• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.36 no.12
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• pp.1318-1329
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• 2012

In-store atmospherics involve quantified physical and social aspects; however, the social quality of a web-based retailing context has largely been under-examined. This study addressed some antecedents and consequences of social ambience in virtual shopping (or e-social ambience) within a web-based U.S. retailing fashion context. This study explored the role of social cues as a viable antecedent to e-social ambience and emotions as its consequence. A conceptual framework was built postulating the effect of social cue for web content, on e-social ambience, emotions, and e-shopping enjoyment. The experimental results (n=488) on a fictitious retail T-shirt website confirmed the positive correlation among the variables; in addition, the level of social cues included within the web content significantly increased the level of customer-perceived e-social ambience of the website and subsequent positive on-site emotions. On-site emotions positively influence purchase intentions. The results expand the current understanding of e-store management by providing novel insight relevant to fashion companies that wish to provide customers with a quality website shopping experience.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.1063-1070
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• 2021

The study aims to investigate the role of consumer's social risk perceptions in retailing private label brands. Since private label brands are exclusively available at retail stores, consumers make their purchase decisions regarding them based on the image of that retail outlet. While buying them, risk perceptions are influenced by the retail store's image. The study identifies various retail store dimensions. For this purpose, primary data was collected using a survey questionnaire that was administered to a representative sample of retail store consumers in Riyadh. The data was analyzed and exploratory factor analysis was applied using SPSS 25 version to extract store image dimensions. The results showed six significant dimensions of retail store image namely 'Sales Staff', 'Promotion', 'Store Environment', 'Store Services', 'Product Assortment', and 'Customer Convenience'. Regression Analysis was performed and the effect of these retail store image dimensions was tested on social risk perceptions of consumers. Results indicate that store image dimensions significantly influence consumer's perceived social risk perceptions. However, the relationship is not consistent across all the six identified store image dimensions. The study brings forth several valuable consumer insights and the findings of the study have some very interesting and practical implications for retailers.

• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.42-56
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• 2013

Nowadays the advantages of multichannel retailing strategy in fashion business have been widely discussed, but empirical research on fashion retail has been limited. The purpose of this research is to provide some ideas on multichannel retailing strategy to fashion retailers through the case of UNIQLO. The online survey was conducted on each 100 female customers in their 20s, 30s, 40s living in seoul among UNIQLO customers. The survey was consisted of measurement items for UNIQLO's online store image and offline store image, customer satisfaction, purchase intention, and demographic attributes. The online survey was found that 30.3% of UNIQLO's multichannel customers bought a product from offline store using online shopping mall as a search channel, on the other hand, 20.7% of UNIQLO's multichannel customers bought a product from online store using offline store as a search channel. Factors of the online shopping mall image were consisted of shopping convenience, product information, price policy, trust. And factors of the offline store image were consisted of trust and store, product information, service. Some factors of online store and offline store image had impact on multichannel customer satisfaction. And, customer satisfaction also had impact on purchase intention of UNIQLO product. Some suggestion for the future of multichannel research in fashion retailing was given.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.13-24
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• 2011

With the increasing market share of retailer brands, many authors have paid considerable attention to retailer brands. Before market liberalisation in 1996 in Korea, retailer brand market was led by the supermarket retailing format, although the first retailer brand product was developed by the department store format. In parallel with the entry of foreign multiple retailers, the retailer brand market has experienced rapid growth. Particularly, the expansion of Tesco UK with well-established retailing know-how into Korea has encouraged Tesco Korea to actively get involved in retailer brand program. As a result, Tesco Korea has led retailer brand market in the Korean marketplace. The research starts with the question of why Tesco Korea has achieved such a higher retailer brand share. Accordingly, this study is to explore how Tesco UK has transferred its own retailing knowledge into Tesco Korea, in terms of retailer brand program development. In order to explore why the retailer brand share of Tesco Korea is higher than that of its counterparts, the author adopted in-depth interview with prepared-questions and store observation as a research methodology. To examine working process as well as information flows within Tesco Korea and from UK to Korea, in-depth interview method is one of the most suitable research methodologies, because of the difficulty of quantifying information or data related to work flows. In addition, to increase the validity of information, the researcher had interviews with Tesco Korea supplier and store personnel. Based on these research techniques, this research explored how Tesco UK has influenced or advised Tesco Korea, particularly, from the point of view of knowledge transfer. Since the entry of Tesco UK into Korea as a joint-venture, the retailer brand market share of Tesco Korea has continuously increased. It would be expected that Tesco UK has helped Tesco Korea to settle down in the Korean market. During interviews with Tesco and a Tesco supplier, the researcher found that Tesco Korea has obviously taken an advantage of retailing know-how created by Tesco UK. Furthermore, the retailer brand development and handling process of Tesco Korea has been operated with the help of Tesco UK. This might mean that Tesco UK has directly or indirectly an impact on the improvement of Korean retailer brand development skills. As a mechanism to transfer retailing knowledge developed in the home market into the host market, one of the international retailers, Tesco UK has adopted many different ways such as annual meeting, trading meeting to import or export own retailer brand products, offering of operation manual developed by Tesco UK and buyer cooperation between Tesco UK and Korea, in order to share information. Through these communication techniques, the knowledge of Tesco UK has been transferred to Tesco Korea. This research accordingly suggests that retailer brand market share is apparently related to how sophisticated or advanced the knowledge of the retailer brand development and handling process of retailers are. It is also demonstrated by this research that advanced development and handling skills make a considerable contribution to increasing retailer brand share in markets with a lower share or no presence of retailer brands.

• Fashion Information and Technology
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• v.10
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• pp.2-9
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• 2013

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.39-57
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• 2012

The unabated influx of micro businesses has turned the Korean retailing market to a rat race, which causes severe financial distress for micro business owners due to heavy competition. The woes of these micro business owner's are exacerbated by the presence of large scale distributors such as Super Supermarket(SSM) and large discount stores. In summary, the Korean retail market is overburdened an uneconomically viable. Retailing has low barriers to entry which attracts unskilled labor or those with little capital. These start-ups have low opportunity costs since they would make low wages elsewhere in the economy. Thus, these owners are content with relatively low returns on their investment. These 'subsistence ventures' are maintained for economical viability rather than economic growth. These 'subsistence ventures' intensifies competition among small-scale businesses. The presence of large retail corporations also aggravates the situation. The recent stagnation of the economy has worsened the retail market in Korea. The overwhelming competition solidifies the coarse structural system and the prolonged economic sluggishness has increased the risk of insolvency for micro business owners. As the economy continues to stagnate, the imminent risk in retailing market will rise up to surface threatening economic stability. More systematic inflows and outflows of retailers are required in order to redress this structural problem. It has been empirically shown that the self-employment rate is high in Korea compared to other OECD countries. To draw the comparison of self-employment rate by industry, Korea shows high rates among transportation, whole sale, retail, education, lodging, and restaurants. In the case of the transportation and education service sectors, this high rate can be explained by the idiosyncratic nature of Korean culture. In the transportation sector, political policies favor private cap service and private freight carriers. In the education service sector, Koreans put particular emphasis on education that leads to many private institutions that outnumber other OECD countries. For these singular reasons, Korea maintains high micro business, self-employed rates particularly in retailing. A comparable nation is Japan, with its similar social, economic, cultural environment among OECD countries. Unlike Korea, Japan has much lower rates of micro business which continues to decrease. Also Korean retailers are much more destitute than Japanese. The fundamental problem of Korean retailing is the involuntary exit of these 'subsistence ventures,' micro businesses with low margins, in which a small drop in demand can lead to financial difficulties for the owner. This problem will be exacerbated when Korean babyboomers retire and join the micro business ventures. The first priority in order to cope with the severity of oversupply in retailing is to provide better opportunities for the potential self-employers. There should be viable alternatives to subsistent ventures. Strengthening the retirement program, scrutiny of exit process, reconfiguration of policy funds are the recommendations.

• The International Journal of Costume Culture
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.101-103
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• 2010

Liberalization may be described as the opening up of the economy to the outside world by relaxing government trade and economic policy restrictions to allow imports. In Kenya, this took place in the early 1990s and it had negative and positive effects on businesses manufacturing and retailing clothing and textiles. This case study narrates what has happened over the last 20 years to businesses in Nairobi, Kenya dealing in clothing and textiles. Some of the original businesses have closed down and been replaced by new ones. More small scale Kenyan businesses have been started dealing in clothing imports from the East and West selling both new and second hand clothes. There has been increased employment in the small scale clothing and textiles sector in garment making and retailing. All in all, liberalization has forced large and medium scale textile manufacture to change strategy so that they target selling to the export market more than to the local market.

• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.961-966
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• 2013

Being one of the most important textile and apparel producers for years, Turkey began to become active in terms of retailing. Although retailing industry is in its growing phase, the social and economic influences caused the customers' tastes and demands to be more distinctive and segmented in parallel with the advancement of the retail industry. Therefore, the retail industry began to develop in more fragmented way where clear boundaries between different types of retailers were established. In this study, the apparel retail market is overviewed and analyzed within the context for determination of the current situation and future prospective. To this aim, the textile and apparel companies that are active in Turkey were classified into groups based on the type of distribution channels they used. Then, the performances of the groups were established using the secondary type of resources. Finally, the findings were summarized, by showing the similarities and differences between different channels.

• Proceedings of the Korean Operations and Management Science Society Conference
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• 2001.10a
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• pp.91-94
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• 2001

The exponential growth of the Internet usage has motivated the launching of many commercial business web sites. Internet as a purchasing medium shows several unique characteristics because of its customer- driven technologies and absence of physical products. Thus, new commercial medium provokes a reclassification of products. Twenty five types of commercial Products are empirically tested in the Internet retailing and found to be grouped into four categories. This classification framework is investigated in the view of involvement and web technology Furthermore, this paper proposes four business web implementation strategies - impressive, simple, sensory, and semantic - based on the product classification. Proposed guidelines on business web might increase customer satisfaction.

• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.14 no.3 s.62
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• pp.353-365
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• 2006

Modern consumers seek various pleasure and fun through shopping. Retailing are offering apparel products with entertainment services to customers such as movie theaters, restaurants and so on. The purposes of this study was investigate the effect of entertainment service on impulse buying behavior. Data were obtained from shoppers (N=684) randomly selected department stores and shopping malls located in Seoul and Busan. They were analyzed by factor analysis, t-test and cross analysis. The results showed that entertainment service users showed likely to be more recreational orientation, to be more pleasure, and better mood in retailing environment than entertainment service non-users. That is entertainment service users were more likely to buy impulsively during shopping than entertainment service non-users. Implication and future research directions discussed.