covering the USA, the UK and France with other planned markets like
Germany; while André Ross had adopted product delivery to the global
market.
Option five: the e-retail mall
The e-retail mall is a website that sells the products of multiple luxury brands
with a single check-out point. This strategy has been adopted mostly by
offline luxury departmental stores such as Macy’s and Neiman Marcus; and
by pure-play e-retailers like net-a-porter.com, yoox.com and eluxury.com.
Another notable company that has implemented the ‘e-retail mall’ strategy in
an elevated manner is glam.com. The website innovatively and creatively
combines the different aspects of fashion retail that online consumers seek.
These include fashion and trends information, style news and celebrity
features. They are provided in a unique space that also includes links to the
websites where the featured items are retailed.
The e-retail mall streamlines the shopping experience for the consumer by
grouping different brands together in one website. It could however lead to the
opposite effect if mismanaged. This could happen when elements that enhance
the online customer experience have not been effectively implemented.
High-impact web experiences are more challenging to produce in an e-
retail mall than in a single brand e-boutique. This is because e-malls focus
more on functionality and managing multiple brands than on creating a pres-
tigious website. Also, a customer who intends to purchase the product of a
particular luxury brand might not appreciate clicking through a website with
multiple brands and products such as an e-retail mall. At the same time, some
online consumers appreciate the variety of product offerings that e-retail malls
offer. This poses a paradox that requires an appropriate strategic balance.
Online luxury consumers lack both physical contact with the products
retailed online and human contact with the sales personnel; therefore their
interaction with the brand is summed up in the visit to the e-store. This means
that online customers would have a higher expectation for an enhanced brand
experience with the brands they encounter online. The elevated brand experi-
ence is more difficult to attain in a website that features numerous brands but
innovative companies like glam.com (Figure 6.10) have implemented tactics
to overcome this through providing e-shoppers with links to luxury brands’
websites.
A major challenge of the e-retail mall strategy option is that the aura of a
luxury brand could be downgraded if the e-mall retails a mix of products from
high-value and low-value brands. For example, the products of Louis Vuitton,
which is considered the most valuable luxury brand in the world, are retailed
on eluxury.com where products from little-known mass fashion brands with
lower brand value are also found. This factor could affect the luxury brand
equity in the long term.
chapter 6 199digital luxury