(To be written. APPENDIX) How would anyone buy clothes online?
'5 text + 0 none text' paragraphs, 485 words, 2845 characters(incl. spaces) - About 1 pages
Created 229 days ago, Updated 224 days ago
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Before even thinking about why small online boutiques are driving growth of the e-commerce, I wondered how people could ever buy clothes online. For me, who as a strategy consultant could not imagine the surge of online clothing shops, this was the first mystery. The early prediction was that e-commerce makes sense where a buyer can make purchase decisions without physically visiting a store or meeting the sales person. Book, music, and video were thought to be good candidates. Once they get online distribution, getting out of papers and CDs, we thought they would be even better fit. For financial products, prove that it is ‘you’ across the Internet, and we’ll send your money right away. No problem at all!
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For physical products, it would be more difficult because consumers want to have a look and perhaps test drive. Some products are better suited. When you buy a PC, you could make purchase decision by reading processor speed, hard drive size, number of USB slots, etc. But to buy clothes, shouldn’t you try them on, not to mention seeing and touching? Let me quote a female who often buys clothes online.
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“I first became interested in online clothing shops while reading women’s magazines. When I visited a site, the price looked reasonable and the clothes on the model looked cute. I started buying because description was detailed enough to save a trip to stores. For me an advantage of online shopping is that you can instantly see what is hot these days. I have returned some of the products that I bought. Most sites have a generous return policy, which makes me comfortable buying clothes online. I found that most of items I returned were the ones that were not put on models, and now I am buying only the ones that are worn by models. I think that is why there are so many pictures of models wearing the clothes on shopping mall sites.”
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Here we can understand how online entrepreneurs have fought successfully to make online shopping of clothes viable. They utilized their inherent advantage fully: price and convenience. Time and money are probably two most desired resources, and they are hitting the center at them. Second, they employed generous return policy as an alternative to the fitting room. Korea’s well-developed courier services play an important role here. In Korea, 1-day delivery is a norm not premium. But returns are lose-lose for both buyers and sellers, and they are finding ways to reduce them including displaying various photoshots per a piece of clothes. By the way, the ‘fitting model’, as they are called in this industry, seems to have become a booming job category.
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We just saw how online shopping of clothes became possible. Those things gave clothes an entry ticket to e-commerce, or a fair ground at best, but cannot explain how online clothing shops are booming more than the other categories.
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