A study of lifestyle fashion retailing in China

The purpose of this paper to examine how Chinese consumers’ perceived functional and symbolic values of lifestyle fashion stores (i.e. merchandise quality, price, convenience, emotional value, aesthetic value and social value) affect their shopping behaviors (i.e. repurchase intention (RI), impulse buying (IB) and time spent (TS)).

In total, 223 eligible responses were collected via an online questionnaire survey. The psychometric properties of the proposed CPV-shopping behavior research model were examined, and the multiple regression method was applied to test the hypotheses.

The findings show that Chinese consumers’ RIs toward and TS in lifestyle fashion stores are determined by their perceived merchandise quality value, price value, emotional value and aesthetic value of lifestyle fashion stores. In contrast, Chinese consumers’ perceived price value and emotional value trigger their IB in the lifestyle fashion stores. The perceived values show satisfactory explanatory power for the variances of Chinese consumers’ shopping behaviors (R²=55, 50 and 49 percent for RI, IB and TS, respectively).

A better understanding of the Chinese consumers’ shopping behaviors toward emerging lifestyle fashion stores may assist retailers in targeting China as the soon-to-be largest consumer market.