Article Preview
TopIntroduction
A web site is considered to be a substitute for the brick and mortar stores. Studies have identified factors like gender (Andrews, Kiel, Drennan, Boyle, & Weerawardena, 2007), word of mouth (Khare, Labrecque, & Asare, 2011), cost reduction (Baba, 2015), shopping experience (Martin, Mortimer, & Andrews, 2015), trust and commitment (Mukherjee & Nath, 2007), subjective norms (Al-hawari & Mouakket, 2012), attitude (Chang & Chin, 2011), social influence(Zhang, Li, Burke, & Leykin, 2014)(Wang, 2013) leading to online purchase intention. Most of these studies have been for online (Mukherjee & Nath, 2007) grocery (Martin, Mortimer, & Andrews, 2015), apparel, ticketing (Al-hawari & Mouakket, 2012), and food retailing (Martınez-Ruiz, Ruiz-Palomino, Martinez-Canas, & Bla´zquez-Resino, 2014) retailing. Very few studies have been conducted for footwear retailing. Footwear is expected to grow by 10% on year on year basis and touch US $ 23.5 billion by 2020 (BMI India Retail Report Q1 2017, 2016) and would be the best performing sector. Assortment satisfaction is one such attribute that determines purchase intention. In other studies, purchase intention of Malaysian online buyers (Rezaei, Amin, & Ismail, 2014) and Indonesian online shoppers (Nuryakin & Farida, 2016) were influenced by their satisfaction. So assortment satisfaction leads to purchase intention.
This paper researches key attributes of assortment satisfaction in the context of online footwear purchase. It has been suggested that assortment satisfaction is one such attribute that determines purchase intention. This paper investigates the factors which determine them. Prior research indicates that assortment satisfaction would happen due to product display, price comparison, information search and etc. Customers are willing to pay the price for a proper product display (Fiore, Yah, & Yoh, 2000). We argue that product display and price comparison effects assortment satisfaction.
This research also investigates if the capacity to compare prices of displayed goods enhances assortment satisfaction even though it is superfluous. This paper undertakes two important factors viz product display and price comparison. Another goal is to understand the importance placed on online store characteristics according to income and gender. Research shows that gender (Lim & Zailani, 2012; Yadav & Rangnekar, 2015) and income (Mittal, Sondhi, & Chawla, 2015; Rana, Murtaza, Noor, & Rehman, 2014) are moderators. Moderation of gender on price comparison and product display has been established through this study. Such investigations provide the first steps towards a greater understanding of the behaviours of the online footwear shopper.
The literature review reveals that online purchase of footwear is still not all encompassing. The objective of this paper is to ascertain the drivers of online purchase of footwear and establish the linkage between assortment satisfaction, price comparison and product display for online purchase. Online channel is not static and changes with time as consumers migrate from one channel to another (Madahi & Sukati, 2016), hence it is necessary to satisfy customers. This research looks if price comparison and product display are the antecedents to assortment satisfaction for online purchase of footwear. The following objectives would be addressed by this study.