Top online luxury apparel and accessories retailers: what are they doing right?

Abstract

Many luxury firms have successfully adopted online sales and online sales growth has outperformed offline sales growth. As online luxury sales continue to grow, service expectations in digital and instore channels are also expected to grow. To add to the research literature, the top performing 46 luxury apparel and accessories websites identified in the Luxury e-Commerce Report from Internet Retailer were content analyzed to determine the state of the art in top performing luxury retail websites in providing needed information (international customer service attributes). Those top performing websites were then compared to 44 randomly selected similar websites on the same attributes to determine how the two groups of websites compared in terms of international customer service attributes. Although top performing luxury retail websites are providing important customer service information that facilitates online purchasing, there is room for improvement. In comparing the two groups of online luxury merchants, each group had strengths and weaknesses. Overall, merchants performed at a suboptimal level on provision of many customer service attributes, need improvement on others, and performed well on a few attributes. These luxury fashion online retailers are at an early stage in providing important customer service attributes on their websites.