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Technology now allows e‐tailers to customize online store atmosphere at the individual level, with the customization controlled and executed by either the retailers or the customers, or both. Since in conventional retailing the manipulation of store atmosphere is controlled mainly by retailers (e.g. store layout, product display techniques, store theatrics, etc.), the potential for mass customization with consumer involvement radically changes the way research regarding online store atmosphere must be approached. Positioned in the e‐tailing research area, the purpose of this paper is to summarize the research challenges presented by virtual store atmosphere customization and control and to formulate specific research propositions.

This viewpoint paper employs an interdisciplinary “desk‐research” approach. It elaborates on the emerging research challenges of customizing store atmosphere in electronic retailing highlighting the differences that exist among the conventional and the virtual retail channels. It then justifies the interdisciplinary nature of store atmosphere studies, investigates the customization challenges available online and formulates specific research questions and direct research propositions.

E‐tailing store atmosphere customization capabilities at the individual level, revolutionizes the established relevant theory from conventional retailing. However, the control of the customization process is a quite complex issue and should be treated as that, by e‐tailers.

The paper sets the research agenda and builds avenues for further research.

The paper provides direct managerial implications for effectively placing online store atmosphere customization in the hands of the consumer‐user.

The paper clearly justifies why current online store atmosphere studies should be adapted to the mass customization challenge applicable online. Similarly, it demonstrates the promising role that consumer control could potentially play on this topic.

The purpose of this paper is to explore children’s responses to store atmosphere, and the role of parent-child interaction in these responses.

The authors used a qualitative study within two French stores and employed a grounded-theory approach to analyse data. Data were collected from 41 in-store observations and 20 in-depth interviews with children aged 7-11.

This research reveals that the impact of store atmospherics on children’s responses to store environment and on their behaviour in-store is a complex phenomenon. Children passively and actively respond to store atmosphere. They appropriate and re-appropriate store environment for their own goal of play. Store atmospherics may lead to positive outcomes in the form of children’s exploration of the store, desire to stay longer and intention to revisit. However, store atmosphere can also become the source of conflicts between parents and children, and therefore have a negative impact on children’s behaviour in-store.

The study deepens the understanding of children’s responses to store atmosphere by taking account of parent-child interaction. It extends research on the effects of store atmosphere on children’s behaviour by suggesting the moderating effect of parent-child conflict. Nevertheless, the number of stores selected limits the findings.

The findings of this study enable retailers to improve the atmosphere of their stores by making it fun and creative in order to attract children to play there. Furthermore, the study provides interesting findings for retailers on how to overcome the challenge of inappropriate store atmosphere creating or aggravating parent-child conflict during shopping trips.

The authors suggest solving conflicts between children and parents through common activities within the store or through interactive technologies that favour communication and enable children to learn through play.

The originality of this paper lies in its focus on the role of parent-child interaction in children’s responses to store atmosphere. The authors intend to reveal the complicated relationship between store atmosphere, children’s responses and parent-child interaction in-store.

Evaluative processes made in retail environments have been shown to vary between groups, particularly between men and women. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that a hedonic or utilitarian store atmosphere leads to different evaluations depending on the consumer's gender orientation.

A pre‐test identifies hedonic and utilitarian store atmospheres. A main study uses an experimental design to compare the impact of these atmospheres on overall store quality, price perceptions and willingness to pay for products in these stores in function of the consumers' gender orientation.

The results show that hedonic atmospheres lead to higher quality perception, higher price perception and higher purchase intention among female‐oriented consumers. Moreover, female‐oriented consumers are willing to pay 32 per cent more for the same product when this product is offered in a hedonic store atmosphere. Retailers should consider carefully how store design affects evaluations among male versus female‐oriented consumers.

The use of students reduces the generalisability of the results. Future research can test the propositions further.

The results suggest that perceptions of store atmospheres are moderated by gender orientation, which is a segmentation variable that may be more relevant in today's gender‐blurring retail environments. Furthermore, the results show how value can be perceived from store atmospheres and transferred to products.

Rapport between service employees and customers has been suggested to be an important determinant of customer relationship management, yet existing marketing literature still lacks a sufficient understanding of how service employees’ nonverbal communication affects customer-employee rapport development in service encounters. The purpose of this paper is to fill this research gap by proposing and testing a model that explores how service employees’ nonverbal communication (employee affective delivery and behavioral mimicry) influences customer positive emotions and customer-employee rapport. The mediating role of customer positive emotions and the moderating role of store atmosphere in the process of customer-employee rapport development were also assessed.

Using an observational methodology in conjunction with a customer survey, multi-source survey data collected from 303 customer-employee pairs in the apparel retailing industry was examined through structural equation modeling and regression analysis.

Results showed that employee nonverbal communication positively influenced customer positive emotions and customer-employee rapport. The partial mediating role of customer positive emotions and the moderating role of store atmosphere in the process of rapport development were also confirmed.

Service firms should train and motivate employees to use nonverbal communication to develop and strengthen customer-employee rapport. The importance of customer positive emotions in the service process should be addressed in the customer-employee rapport development process. Moreover, service managers should also allocate firm resources to create a well-designed store atmosphere for target customers.

This research represents one of the earliest studies to explore and empirically test the influence of employee nonverbal communication on customer-employee rapport development in service encounters. The partial mediating role of customer positive emotions and the moderating role of store atmosphere on the relationship between employee nonverbal communication and customer-employee rapport were also proposed and confirmed.

The nature of retail service varies from personal service to the provision of greater ambience. Indeed, anything that adds value to the merchandise itself can be considered part of the service provided by the retailer. The focus of this paper is on that part of retail service that involves direct interactivity between the store and the customer. There are two main types of physical interactivity, namely personal service and store design and atmosphere. This paper aims to develop constructs of these two types of interactivity and analyse their impact on store loyalty. An extra dimension is added to this study by contrasting the role of service between superstores and traditional specialist stores in two retail categories. A key finding was that the major difference between the service provided by superstores compared to traditional specialist stores relates to store design and atmosphere. This leads to the suggestion that the recent wave of superstores has ushered in a new paradigm of retail service, one with elevated emphasis on self‐service principles. A further finding was that store design and atmosphere was one of the more important determinants of store loyalty. The paper shows that superstores have revolutionised the nature of retail service, mainly by more effective configuration of self‐service, mediated through store design.

Online retailing has attracted a lot of attention in recent years due to its great potential and significant implications for buyers and sellers. This study adopts the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework to illustrate how store layout design and atmosphere influence consumers' shopping intention on the website.

The sample for this study comprised 626 respondents from the internet users. A structural equation model was employed to identify the interrelationships of store layout design, atmosphere, emotional arousal, attitude toward the website, and purchase intention.

The analytical results of this study indicate that store layout design has significant impacts on emotional arousal and attitude toward the website, and thus has a positive influence on purchase intention. In addition, atmosphere has a more influential effect on emotional arousal than store layout design.

This study provides new insights into the influences of store layout design and atmosphere on consumer online shopping intentions.

The aims of this paper are to establish: a typical women's apparel store environment as a realistic base for measuring the effects of changes; effective environmental stimuli levels; and the effect of repeated exposure on affect.

A schema of typical stimuli is developed through literature, observing 212 stores, and surveying 39 women's fashion retail GMs. An experiment (n=489) establishes the set of stimuli and effective levels for creating affect for a women's fashion store. Shoppers (n=62) were repeatedly exposed to combinations of the two sets (industry standard and “ideal”) to examine whether decay in affect occurs, and whether changes can mitigate this.

Interactions between sensory stimuli have a significant effect on fashion shoppers’ affect for a store. Fashion retailers are less differentiated in their use of sensory stimuli than they could be to achieve the responses they expect. Stagnation from repeated exposure can diminish affect for the store whereas small changes in stimuli levels can revitalise and increase affect.

A model of sensory stimuli‐based relationships with shopper affect should incorporate interactions. Empirically, different stimuli can easily be added or substituted within a dimension to test its effect within a factorial design. A model of fashion store atmosphere is likely to require a mediating influence of repeated exposure.

It is worthwhile getting the “correct” package of stimuli for a fashion store's atmosphere. This does not necessarily require wholesale changes; rather small changes in stimuli level can enhance a store.

The paper presents the only study to use a holistic approach to store atmosphere and base effectiveness measures against the fashion industry norm, and consider the effect of repeated exposure.

The purpose of this paper is to derive and empirically test a theoretically grounded model of motivations (socializing, entertainment, self-expression, and information seeking) that lead to the use of Facebook Places. Store atmosphere factors (ambient, design, and social factors) were also investigated as moderators of the relationship between the motivation and use of Facebook Places.

Based on a survey of 504 South Korean Facebook users, this research applies a structural equation modeling approach to test the research hypotheses.

The analysis revealed that motivations such as socializing, entertainment, and self-expression influence the use of Facebook Places, and design factors moderate the relationship between the motivations and the use of Facebook Places.

This study provide insights that can help Facebook and store owners develop effective marketing strategies that could increase revenue. When users check-in at a location it creates free word of mouth advertising. Thus, identifying the factors that motivate users to check-in at a particular location will be an important way to advertise.

While uses and gratification theory has mainly been used to study mass media, this study applied the theory to Facebook Places, a type of social networking sites-based location-based services. Additionally, this study added store atmosphere elements as moderators, which is an appropriate concept in the context of the Facebook check-in service.

This conceptual article presents a theoretical approach to understanding the atmosphere at sports stadiums. Using the environmental psychology behavioural model proposed by Mehrabian & Russell (1974), and taking into account recent findings in consumer research, we develop a comprehensive framework for investigating this atmosphere. The framework highlights the role of emotions elicited by different stimuli in sports stadiums. We also suggest a number of direct and indirect influences on behavioural outcomes, caused by the emotional reactions and personal predispositions of spectators - influences that are of economic relevance. The proposed framework also forms a starting point for future empirical studies.

The purpose of this study is to identify the drivers of loyalty model in the coffee shop industry in Indonesia based on service quality, store atmosphere and price fairness mediated by customer satisfaction.

The sample size used for this study was 384 customers from 16 most comfortable coffee shops in Jakarta based on Nibble's survey. Confirmatory factor analysis was employed to confirm the attributes of each factor and to assess the validity and reliability, average variance extracted and composite reliability was applied. Further hypothesis testing was performed using structural equation modeling.

The result shows that customer loyalty is affected by service quality – comprising 5 subdimensions: tangible, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy – and price fairness mediated by customer satisfaction. It was found that service quality plays a significant role in the coffee shop industry in Indonesia. However, the store atmosphere was found rejected.

This is the first study integrating service quality, store atmosphere, price fairness and customer satisfaction to study the customer loyalty model in the coffee shop industry in Jakarta.