On the Design of Sales Support Systems for Online Apparel Stores

Many online stores apply several sales support systems, e.g., recommender systems, sorting and filtering tools, to support buyers during the shopping process. Although, the research highlights the positive effect of such systems, the current study questions its applicability in online stores for products which serve users\u27 needs to be unique like apparel or luxury products. We analyze female users\u27 buying behavior of apparel products in a laboratory setting and find that users with high trendiness undertake in general more search steps. Further, we find that most users rely during their search process on different sorting and filtering as well as on keyword search tools while personalized and non-personalized recommendations play a minor role for users in this industry. Further, we find that users with high trendiness avoid following top seller lists and wear with it -recommendations. Moreover, the provision of top seller rankings does not influence the consumers\u27 product choice