Fashion in the Digital Marketplace: Innovation and Consumer Experience in E-Commerce

Dear Colleagues,

Digital technologies are reshaping contemporary marketplaces, redefining how value is created, communicated, and experienced. In the fashion domain, innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI), augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), and blockchain are transforming how products are designed, evaluated, marketed, and consumed within digital commerce environments. These developments present both new opportunities and challenges for fashion brands, retailers, and consumers alike.

Despite the rapid growth of research on digital technologies in retailing and e-commerce, several theoretical tensions remain insufficiently understood. Intelligent systems, for example, simultaneously enhance convenience while challenging perceptions of autonomy and control. Immersive technologies expand experiential possibilities yet raise questions about authenticity and reality. Algorithmic mediation enables personalization but may obscure agency, accountability, and trust. These tensions point to deeper conceptual and theoretical issues that warrant systematic scholarly attention.

This Special Issue is designed to engage directly with these evolving scholarly debates and theoretical challenges. We seek original, high-quality research that examines how emerging digital technologies shape fashion e-commerce and the digital consumer experience. We welcome work that advances, extends, or challenges existing theoretical perspectives in digital marketing, e-commerce, and consumer behaviour.

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• AI-enabled personalization, recommendation systems, and consumer decision-making.
• Immersive retail technologies (AR/VR), virtual environments, and experiential consumption.
• Algorithmic influence, perceived intelligence, and human–AI interaction.
• Blockchain, digital product passports, and mechanisms of trust and transparency.
• Consumer responses to machine-generated versus human-generated designs or content.
• Technology-driven transformations of branding, identity, and symbolic consumption.
• Strategic, organizational, and societal implications of technology-mediated markets.

Submissions may explore consumer-level phenomena such as perception, evaluation, judgment, trust, and behaviour, as well as organizational, ethical, and strategic implications for firms operating in technology-mediated environments. We welcome conceptual, empirical, design-led, and industry-focused research that advances theory and practice at the intersection of fashion, technology, and e-commerce.

Through this Special Issue, we seek to stimulate deeper theoretical inquiry into how digital technologies reshape consumer experience, decision processes, and market dynamics while fostering cross-disciplinary dialogue among scholars studying technology-mediated consumption.

Dr. Lauren Copeland
Dr. Xingqiu Lou
Dr. Jiayin Li
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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