LAUSR

In the last several years, the world has witnessed tremendous changes in selling goods and services. The fashionable goods and services including clothing and accessories, from non-branded street items to high-fashion luxuries, are the first-tier category that retailers utilize to test new and risky technologies in delivering values and products to their consumers. This special collection aims to advance the knowledge related to changing retail experiences of consumers due to current technological development applied to fashion businesses. Most of these technologies are new to the world, especially the fashion retail industry. In this respect, investigating how these technology-enhanced retail services would affect consumers and retailers who interact with each other through fashion is meaningful. In this special collection, four interesting studies are introduced. Each study investigated a new retail context, including video blog (v-log commerce), virtual reality (VR) store, social commerce, and paid mobile media service (pMMS), supported by technological advancement. Reflecting the increasing popularity of video as a fashion selling medium, Choi and Lee investigated the v-log commerce. Video (V) commerce itself is not new concept as it is similar with TV commercials and home shopping. V-commerce targeting generation Z has been armored by mobile and social network technology. Retailers adopt the concept and offer diverse types of video services, such as live commerce, v-log commerce, and “See Now Buy Now” service. Recently, MatchesFashion.com successfully experimented with applying V-commerce to sell luxury products. The research article by Choi and Lee, “Effects of fashion vlogger attributes on product attitude and content sharing,” reports an empirical study based on quasi-experimental design. The authors proposed that attractiveness, expertise, and trustworthiness are critical v-logger attributes that affect viewers’ attitudes and behavioral intention and empirically confirmed their propositions. They also considered emotional bonding between a v-logger and viewers and product presentation styles as important moderating factors in explaining the effect of the said attributes. Interestingly, the importance of attractiveness of v-logger is low among viewers with a strong emotional bonding. As the authors themselves emphasized, v-loggers and viewers’ relationship must be a key to the success of V-commerce. Reality technologies, such as VR, augmented reality, and mixed reality, have been adopted by innovative retailers into different operation steps to provide new experience Open Access