Webbutiker – Hur hanteras frånvaron av det fysiska rummet för kommunikation?

Abstract

Online shopping is growing and its turnover increases each year. Internet has therefore become an important retail location for companies. Web shops lack the physical room for marketing as well as face-to-face interaction between customer and salesperson. Therefore there is a need to develop marketing and customer communication methods for this way of shopping. In physical shops the customer has the ability to try on the garments and be pampered by the staff. All in all, the whole visit can be seen as an experience. For the fashion web shops, this is not possible and hence, they have to find other ways. Our purpose with this study is to describe how web shops replace the physical room for communication. We will do that by identify and describe the different functions offered to the fashion web shops' customers. Further we aim to find out which functions can be regarded as standard, and which are extra and hence could be seen as competitive advantages. Based on these descriptions we will be able to present a normative model for best practice for the fashion web shop industry. Our literature review begins with a general introduction to marketing, market communication and how Internet has affected these two areas. This is followed by a more focused review on the literature of web shops and the various functions related to them, for example product presentation and different kinds of services. The primary aim of our literature review was to formulate our research questions but it has also provided us with concepts and models for the structuring of our findings. We started our study by mapping the field of web shops by making observations on the Internet. Then we divided our material in categories so that we could limit our further part of the study. We chose H&M, Nelly and Acne as study cases for our indepth study, and we chose another seven web shops for comparisons. The functions that were observed more thorough were product presentation, purchase related and relation oriented functions. Our empirical material was then analysed according to Kotler’s levels of product. By doing this we also present the normative model for best practice. We have found that web shops use several different methods to replace the physical functions. Both virtual dressing rooms and video clips of catwalks will probably be a part of best practice in the future. The loss of the physical functions makes it difficult II I for web shops to fully compete with physical shops. There are however several benefits of web shops that customers can’t get from a physical shop, for example the large range of products, and the 24-hours availability. In conclusion, physical and virtual shops convey different kinds of experiences for the customer. Web shops can be a complement to physical shops, but they will probably not be able to fully replace them. This Bachelor thesis will follow in Swedish.