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This study aims at examining the role of the e-store brand personality congruence/incongruence of a multichannel apparel retailer in the formation of consumers' perceived e-store brand fit and e-store patronage intention, based on the concept of image congruence.

An online survey was conducted with a US national sample of 458 female consumers (20–50 years old) who had shopped for clothing online.

Results revealed that e-store brand personality incongruence in three personality dimensions had a negative impact on consumers' e-store patronage intention directly as well as indirectly by reducing the consumers' global perception of the e-store brand fit. Further, the retailer's relevance to the consumer moderated the relationship between the perceived e-store brand fit and e-store patronage intention in that this relationship was significantly greater among consumers with a high (vs low) perceived self-relevance of the retail brand.

The findings highlight the importance of symbolically integrated cross-channel brand management for multichannel apparel retailers by clearly identifying their brand personality and carefully crafting it into their e-store interface design and e-store visual merchandising to convey the brand personality.

This study expands the application of image congruence to the cross-channel image congruence phenomenon in multichannel retailing environments by examining the e-store brand image congruence employing both direct and indirect approaches.

To examine the effectiveness of a multichannel strategy, this study mainly investigates two issues: (1) whether customers' five value perceptions (i.e. product quality, service quality, innovation, price and store image) extend from e-stores to physical stores and (2) whether customers' five value perceptions derived from e-stores/physical stores facilitate purchase intention within and beyond the channel context.

This study develops a research model to elaborate on the relationships between the focal constructs and collects 177 useable responses via an online community and personal contacts survey. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) methods and mediation analyses are conducted to validate the proposed hypotheses.

The results show that the values perceived in e-stores/physical stores generally motivate online/offline purchase intention, respectively. Next, based on Tversky's belief/feature matching process, the five value perceptions correlate with their counterparts across online and offline channels. The results of the mediation analyses suggest that the advantages established in online channels may be contagious to offline channels at the belief level. Specifically, four of the five online value perceptions may have different effects on offline purchase intention: (1) product quality perceived in e-stores directly (negative) and indirectly (positive) results in offline purchase intention, demonstrating cannibalization effects and (2) service quality, innovation and store image perceived in e-stores indirectly and positively contribute to offline purchase intention, indicating synergetic effects.

The findings of this study provide several important theoretical and practical implications for multichannel and omnichannel retailing strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to identify how fashion and cosmetics e-stores compete and grow to help e-commerce managers set the corresponding marketing strategy. It describes the relevance of customer acquisition and retention to market share as the essential performance metrics.

An empirical generalization approach where patterns in data appearing across studies are described by a mathematical or graphical method is used. To do that, the authors observed real transactional data and the effect of how e-stores benefit from new and returning customers and gain a larger market share. The authors have analysed behavioural data from nearly 124,000 e-commerce customers in two highly popular product categories (fashion and cosmetics) in the size of 10,000,000 euros in sales or more.

Fashion and cosmetics e-stores with more market penetration tend to have a higher market share measured both by the number of total purchases and the number of sales in euro. In other words, market penetration is a solid predictor of market share in all circumstances. Interestingly, no significant difference in loyalty has been observed in relation to market share growth except in the situation where the market partition was excluded from the product category.

The businesses under study derived only from one country and only two product categories were observed. Thus, there is a potential limitation in generalizing the findings to the whole e-commerce market from a geographical and category perspective. The length of the observation period may also play a role as a longer period increases the chance of repeat buying.

E-commerce managers can gain long-term market share growth mainly via higher market penetration (acquisition of new customers) and should avoid misleading overfocus on loyalty tactics (retention of current customers). The study also provides important benchmarks for e-commerce businesses in the fashion and cosmetic categories.

In the market share growth literature, only a handful of studies focus on stores and not on products. Moreover, there is a dominance of fast-moving consumer goods categories. Surprisingly, studies analysing ever-growing e-commerce markets are scarce. Thus, this research is original because it describes, using empirical data, how brands online, at the store level and within the fashion and cosmetics category, grow their market share. It is also one of the few studies that work with real business transactional data.

In the marketing and consumer behavior literature, much remains to be explained about customer citizenship behavior in a highly technological e-retailing context. The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a survey of 186 e-shoppers which was conducted grounded in the social exchange theory.

Structural equation modeling is used to test the proposed model.

The results provide support that e-customer familiarity with an e-store and facilitating conditions provided by an e-retailer influence e-customers ' e-satisfaction, e-loyalty, and e-commitment with an e-retailer, all of which exert different effects on three dimensions of e-customer citizenship behavior.

The results of this study offer e-retailers a way to stay ahead of their competitors by focusing on online attributes that are difficult to duplicate when it comes to customer relationship such as e-loyalty, e-commitment and e-customer citizenship behavior.

This study represents one of the initial attempts to validate a customer citizenship behavior model in an e-retailing setting using e-store familiarization and facilitating conditions as the primary determinants for developing e-store attitudes and behaviors among e-shoppers.

The growth in social content such as video facilitates consumer exposure to social information at e-tail settings. Research has recommended enhancing the e-store socialness. Focusing on focal consumer outcomes (flow and purchase intentions), the current research delineates a boundary condition, proposing that e-tail socialness improves outcomes when the consumer interdependent self, rather than the independent self, is activated.

The experimental approach is employed to test the research thesis. Two experiments (N1 = 303 Females 42.4%; N2 = 387 Females 51.4%) that used different manipulation for socialness and sample frames (USA and Canadian) are performed. Analysis of variance was applied.

The results generally support the research thesis, suggesting that e-tail socialness enhances consumer flow and purchase intentions when the interdependent self is activated. The effect, however, is marginal for segments with high brand preference.

As more information increase overload and reduce decision quality, e-tail practitioners should focus on providing social information predominately for consumers whose interdependent self is activated. This recommendation is particularly relevant for segments with low brand preference.

So far, studies recommend enhancing the e-store socialness, or increasing the social volume, to achieve better outcomes. Such research stream is giving rise to the “social is better in e-tail” conventional wisdom. The current work contributes by delineating a boundary condition based on consumer self-construal. This work suggests that the use of online socialness is fruitful predominantly for interdependent consumers.

An increasing number of consumers are turning to the Internet to make their purchases. Yet, many e‐tailers are going out of business or retrenching. If e‐tailers hope to attract and retain satisfied online shoppers, they need to know what evaluative criteria consumers use when selecting an e‐tailer. Past research has provided some insight into what characteristics shoppers assess in cyberspace outlets. The extant work, though, has not been without its limitations. Consequently, the present study utilizes a literature review, qualitative research, and quantitative research to identify the underlying e‐store choice dimensions of shoppers. In addition, results of multiple regression analysis show that merchandise and interactivity Web attributes are predictors of consumers' attitude toward online shopping. Implications for e‐store managers and future research are also provided.

Building a customer base as an outcome of customer satisfaction has not been investigated empirically in e‐tailing industry. This paper seeks to fill this gap in the literature.

Explores the relationship between satisfying customers and building a customer base using data envelopment analysis (DEA). Data from the e‐retailing industry related to the input variables (e.g. customers' ratings on a set of e‐store attributes) and output variables (e.g. a proxy measure of “customer base”) are analyzed.

Performance scores for developing a customer base vary across product categories. Performance score is a good parameter for predicting future change on a unique number of visitors and on the competition pattern for a particular e‐tailer.

Further study can examine other drivers of a developing customer base (e.g. advertising, trust building, and strategic alliance) – thereby producing more robust evidence for customer base development in e‐tailing industry.

Good practices in the generation of customers and page view have been identified. Knowing the efficiency patterns of an e‐tailer makes it possible to guide managerial action by providing a measure of the extent to which different management actions at the e‐tailer can lead to higher future customer growth. Managers should realize that customers match realizations and expectations of product/service performance.

This study has identified satisfaction as the important driver of developing a customer base. It focuses on improving diagnosis of the performance of e‐tailers by assessing reach efficiency and page view efficiency separately.

The purpose of this paper, building on the media richness theory (MRT), is to propose that while communicating product information via streaming video should enhance outcome measures, such an enhancement will be evident mainly for users with equivocal, latent goals (i.e. recreational browsing) rather than for those with less equivocal, concrete goals (i.e. the search of a specific product).

The experiment involved 337 potential online consumers in Canada, and had full factorial design with four conditions (two methods to communicate product information: textual vs streaming video, and two goals: product searching vs recreational browsing). Analysis of covariance was used to test the hypotheses.

The results lent support to the hypotheses. The perceived information quality, trusting competence, and arousal for participants with recreational browsing goals were significantly affected when product information where communicated using streaming video. For participants with concrete goals (product searchers), the traditional textual method was as effective as the streaming video method.

The findings entice practitioners to use rich media such as the streaming video method to communicate online information predominantly for users with experiential browsing goals, and to use lean media for users with less equivocal, concrete goals.

The results contribute to the sparse literature that underscores the key role of user goal in shaping the effectiveness of online information. The results provide empirical support to the prediction of MRT that the use of rich media to communicate information is advantageous for users with latent, equivocal goals.

To investigate the relationship between key users (defined as their influence) in “information”, “purchase”, “communication” or “entertainment” networks, and the number of elicited requirements in web‐based information systems (WIS).

A lab experiment was designed and conducted to investigate the relationship between college students' elicited requirements for two WIS cases and their social networks.

The individual centrality in “information” networks has a significant positive relationship with the numbers of elicited “information” requirements and total requirements; however, the individual centrality in other social networks has no significant relationship with the number of the elicited requirements.

The requirements collected from “key users” may account for most requirements, which is similar to the results predicted by Pareto's rule.

The origin of a WIS depends on a few influential users. These key users possess more power than others, and they define not only the “requirements” of the site but also its content or knowledge. The WIS designers may take advantage of this fact.

This paper fills the information requirement elicitation gap, while transferring the conventional IS development experiences to WIS.

To provide an initial framework for online third party complaining and complimenting behavior as a consequence of online product or customer service failure or success, using a third party consumer evaluation web site.

Based on critical incidents supplied by consumers in a third party consumer forum web site, a clear picture of the type and frequency of online service failures and successes is expected to develop using critical incident technique and scientific text analyzing methods for qualitative analysis.

The speed of shipping, shipping materials or packaging and customer service appear to be critical for the online transaction to be a success. Ease of ordering was shown to influence the likelihood of complimenting the most. The results provided support for the existence of bivalent satisfiers, monovalent satisfiers and monovalent dissatisfiers within the online retail environment.

Text analyzer has certain software limitations that should be considered. While searching for word patterns, it is possible for the software to use one of several clustering methods, which may be open to subjective interpretation to some extent. The quantitative portion of the study was also limited by the four attribute categories that were used by the online third party web site.

The results provide very practical information and impartial advice for online retailers to improve their service by managing reputation in third party consumer evaluations.

Provides an initial step towards understanding the nature of online store third party complimenting and complaining behaviour.