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1. Introduction
With the growth of digital technology, luxury fashion consumers today utilise several channels including brick-and-mortar stores and online channels to search for information and purchase products. Luxury products have been traditionally sold at brick-and-mortar stores (e.g. offline) because of their highly priced and prestigious characteristics (Vigneron and Johnson, 1999). Luxury fashion consumers expect personalised customer services and tactile shopping experiences corresponding to the higher price (Dauriz et al., 2014). Thus, a common form of multi-channel shopping has been found to be using the online channel for information, product discovery and price comparison, whereas the offline channel is used for the actual purchase (Yu et al., 2011). However, this way of thinking has evolved. According to Achille et al. (2018), approximately 78 per cent of luxury sales are digitally influenced or conducted online. Moreover, online luxury sales currently make up 8 per cent of total luxury sales in the United States; however, these are expected to grow up to 25 per cent by 2025 (D'Arpizio and Levato, 2017). About 23 per cent of younger consumers between 18 and 35 years old have used an online channel for their first luxury purchase. Therefore, it is important to understand what attributes young consumers prefer in their online luxury shopping journey compared to an offline shopping journey.
With several luxury retailers experiencing stagnant growth due to market saturation in the luxury industry, the effective utilisation of multi-channel was emphasised in recent years (Dahlhoff, 2016). Multi-channel practices refer to using multiple channels, both online and offline channels, to attract more cross-shoppers, a broader range of consumers and provide convenience, a key benefit sought by young consumers (Harris et al., 2011; Yu et al., 2011). Variations in the attributes of each channel can elicit differing levels of utility, and the ways consumers perceive these attributes can significantly influence their channel choice (Schoenbachler and Gordon, 2002; Shin and Kim, 2006). Consumers can enjoy broader and deeper product assortments, lower prices and detailed product information in the online channels compared with the traditional offline stores (Choi and Shen, 2017; Lu, 2017; Noble et al., 2005). Moreover, virtual technology began to be used in the online channel by several luxury retailers such as Burberry and Dior to...