Content area
Full Text
Introduction
In today's digital world, how electronic devices can be efficiently employed to provide an enriched consumer shopping experience and boost consumer engagement is an imperative issue. Recent rapid advancements and innovation in new digital technologies provide various opportunities for retailers to build interactive relations with consumers and provide personalized, exceptional shopping experiences (Wang, 2021). For instance, through the use of virtual reality (VR), consumers can browse 3D images of products in a virtual mall (Wang, 2021), travel anywhere in the world (Kim et al., 2020), test drive a car (Farah et al., 2019; Stott, 2016), and watch designers' live stream runway shows (Vogue, 2016) as they sit in their living rooms. Due to the ability to be integrated into various applications such as in retail, education, healthcare, gaming and entertainment (Grand View Research, 2017), the market size of consumer VR is expected to reach 16 billion US dollars by 2022 from 7.2 billion in 2019 (Statista, 2020).
VR is designed to enhance and enrich a user's experience (Yim et al., 2017). It creates a simulated real-world environment by incorporating sight, touch, hearing, smell, and/or taste. Thus, VR delivers a direct or close-to direct experience to the user and allows the user to evaluate realistically displayed items in a sensory virtual world (Yim et al., 2017). In retail, VR application can provide numerous opportunities to retailers and diverse benefits to consumers.
From a retailer's viewpoint, VR can be used as a superior sales tool by providing more products in a virtual setting than normally available in physical stores and as an efficient means of communication and/or marketing tool. Through VR, retailers can incorporate various amusing features such as brand ads, fashion shows, and in-depth videos about the company and manufacturing processes to enhance consumer engagement (Martínez-Navarro et al., 2019). For consumers, VR stores are accessible 24/7 from anywhere with an Internet connection (Peukert et al., 2019). Through VR, consumers can move around the store naturally and thus better understand the features of the product by interacting with a more realistic product compared to merely observing images of a product displayed on the online site (Lombart et al., 2019). Thus, shopping in a VR environment increases consumers' actual perceived...