Technical and Hedonistic Variables of Online Visual Merchandising: Do They Influence Apparel Website Popularity and Attractiveness?

This study looks for a correlation between visual hedonistic and technical variables and site success, simultaneously establishing whether there are any recorded evolutionary aspects of technical variables. A mixed method approach was adopted and the analysis was divided into the following phases: content analysis on technical and hedonistic characteristics; traffic analysis, analysis of the position of websites in relation to data traffic using a size reduction technique; cross-analysis of results obtained in the two previous phases to observe the cluster structure from a point of view of data traffic. The results state that there is no clear correlation between technical and hedonistic qualities of an e-commerce site in the apparel industry and the popularity and attractiveness of their site, and therefore, the authors cannot confirm the four proposed hypotheses.