How to design fashion retail's virtual reality platforms

High-street fashion retail faces an uncertain future because of fluctuating consumer shopping habits. To revive fashion retailers, adopting disruptive technologies such as virtual reality (VR) becomes important to offer highly valued consumer experiences. Yet v-commerce designers still lack sufficient guidance to create effective retail environments. This paper establishes the v-commerce experience that targets fashion consumers’ desire and presents 13 specific design guidelines.

In this study, 22 participants, 20 consumers and two VR developers were interviewed regarding attitudes towards VR, motivation to shop through v-commerce and the moderating variables that influence virtual environment perceptions.

Consumers expect a vivid shopping environment with authentic product features instead of the more common simulated environment. Hedonically motivated consumers are more open to v-commerce than utilitarian consumers and consumers aged 18–34 years regard interactivity, personalisation and social networking as critical to offer a cost-efficient shopping experience.

This paper explored the ways v-commerce delivers creative experiences to facilitate consumer purchase behaviour, contributing to the high street's regeneration. Yet consumers have too high expectations of lifelike interaction in v-commerce, which is beyond contemporary VR's capabilities. Future research should focus on developing authenticity of v-commerce environments, i.e. vivid interaction with product and people.

This paper establishes the fundamental design rules for v-commerce platforms, enabling designers to create effective retail environments, sympathetic to the consumer's cognitive desires.