E-tail Evolution

With the expansion of Internet penetration and consumers’ continuous efforts to discover new ways to use the Internet, marketers strive to gain a competitive advantage by understanding the factors driving consumers to shop online and identifying target consumer segments. Despite the growing interest among researchers and retail marketers, still, there is a general lack of research on, and a need to improve understanding of, the drivers of consumer e-shopping behavior and e-shopper groups for apparel products. According to McGuire’s (1974) model of motivation theory, human motives driven by unfulfilled needs lead goal oriented behavior such that people strive to achieve subjective satisfaction and gratification regardless of the type of motive. Marketing research has explored various shopping motives which mainly encompass goal-directed and experiential shopping motives. In addition to traditional shopping motives, this study considers shoppers’ beliefs about technology use as e-shoppers are both consumers and technology. Taking shopping motives and technology use-related beliefs into account simultaneously would help better understand consumers’ e-shopping motives and e-shopper segments exhibiting different apparel online shopping behaviors. In exploring these aspects, this study addresses the following research questions: (1) what are the key motives driving customers to shop for apparel products? (2) what are the unique segments of online consumers based on the shopping motives? And (3) how can different patterns of behavior be explained by different e-shopper segments? Online surveys were administered to college students at a large, midwestern university in the U.S. Using the context of browsing for/purchasing apparel products online, 298 usable responses were gathered. First, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with shopping motive items was performed to identify e-shopping motives and yielded 12 factors. The factors include six functional factors (convenience, ease of use, economic value-seeking, usefulness, security/privacy, and merchandise assortment) and six nonfunctional motives (company reputation, home shopping, informative service, company clientele, customer service, and hedonic value). Three of the functional motives relate to beliefs about technology; ease of use, usefulness and privacy/security, and one functional motive, hedonic value represents the experiential aspect of online apparel shopping. Second, in order to develop a shopper typology based on the 12 e-shopping factors identified, cluster analysis was performed. The analysis revealed five e-shopper segments: apathetic, accommodating, demanding, convenienceoriented recreational, and technology oriented shopper segments. Last, MANOVA was conducted to examine differences across the five e-shopper clusters with respect to attitude toward and intention to perform online apparel shopping. The results indicated significant differences in e-shopping behavioral intention across the five clusters with respect to both attitude toward e-shopping and intention to shop online. This empirical examination of motives driving online shopping behaviors extends our understanding of a variety of underlying dimensions and provides new apparel shopper profiles for the Internet format. Findings that online consumers have utilitarian (functional) as well as hedonic (nonfunctional) shopping motives empirically validate the multidimensionality of shopping motives pertinent to the Internet shopping context. Given that online shopping behaviors are likely to be driven by product/service acquisition (marketing) motives and/or technology use (i.e., Internet) beliefs, investigating both simultaneously sheds light on online shopping motive literature.