Comparative Analysis of Online Visual Merchandising Practices Between Government and Private Indian Online Retailers

Visual merchandising has long lived in the domain of brick-and-mortar stores. It is viewed as an indispensable tool to provide aesthetic pleasure to the customers and to uplift the sales of the stores. Similarly, in the era of online retail stores, retailers need to raise their game so as to rope in more customers and sweep off their feet with visually appealing merchandise. This research paper set forth an investigation conducted to study the differences in online visual merchandising practices of Indian online handloom retailers between Private players and Government players. Few literatures on the related topics were considered for better understanding of the head and to spot the research gap in previously published research papers. A total of 20 Indian E-commerce portals / websites were identified including 10 government and 10 private retailers, which further were analyzed through content analysis and chi-square test. This research resulted into extraction of 6 online visual merchandising factors: product presence, product information, services, interest, aesthetics and fitness. There were significant differences in all 6 factors. This research contributes to the understanding of elements and major factors which constitute to the online visual merchandising composition of an online retailer. Academicians and practitioners of Visual Merchandisers will also be benefited by knowing how online Visual Merchandising factors were used differently by government and private players for retailing of handloom sarees over e-commerce platform in India