Understanding fashion omnichannel experience through mobile application customer reviews

This research explored the human-machine user/consumer experience when customers use fashion retail mobile applications under the omnichannel context, aiming to identify key themes and varying customer values from customer reviews of different tiers of fashion mobile apps. 5,000 customer reviews about ten department store mobile apps were crawled from the iOS App Store in June 2021. Using text-mining methods, including Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling, sentiment classification, and word co-occurrence network, this research reveals predominant topics/themes in mobile app reviews that reflect consumer perceptions of human-machine experience and omnichannel shopping experience. These insights underscore the critical role of human-machine user experience in the success of omnichannel strategies and identified the four important instrumental qualities in fashion mobile app user experience, which are ease of use, usability, fluency, and personalization. The findings also shed light on customers’ expectations and perceived value concerning different types of fashion omnichannel retailers.