| Consumers expect stores to offer an integrated shopping experience across multiple, online and offline, retail channels. The link between offline and online experiences is crucial because of the advent of new sophisticated technologies that have made the distinction between the real and the virtual increasingly challenging (McLeod et al., 2014) and blurry (Schumpeter, 2014). Not surprisingly, an integrated multichannel strategy for category assortments and product prices has important positive effects for retail chains (Melis et al., 2016). Thus, the success of retailing does not only lie in physical stores and traditional e-commerce environments but also in virtual stores and environments as well (Yoo et al., 2015). Virtual environments such as virtual worlds and virtual marketplaces are considered the next major step of e-commerce (Jung and Pawlowski, 2014). Although they originate in the gaming and entertainment industries, Mims (2015) suggests that they will grow massively and will become compelling in the near future. Indicatively, Bird (2016) estimated that the virtual reality market will reach $6.7bn within the year, and is expected to reach $70bn in 2020; that is, there are opportunities for significant entrepreneurial benefits. Virtual environments offer sophisticated technologies and characteristics such as stereoscopic 3D visualization and scanning, biometrics, virtual kiosks and immersive and synchronously interactive systems that enhance the customer experience, all of which make these environments more realistic and closer to the real world context (Fang et al., 2014). For example, John Lewis is testing virtual reality equipment to create virtual shopping catalogues (Benady, 2015), while Tommy Hilfiger has become the first retailer to introduce virtual reality headsets for immersing its customers in a 3D virtual trip (Tabuchi, 2015). The prominence of store design and store atmosphere and their implications for customer experience in the era of the Omni-channel and technology-driven shopping environments has been acknowledged in the marketing literature (Poncin and Mimoun, 2014; Seckler et al., 2015). Brocato et al. (2015, p. 200) report that “in atmosphere dominant service firms, sense of place leads to place attachment, which in turn plays a critical role in driving desirable customer behaviors”. Retailers adopt the use of innovative and immersive technologies in physical stores to improve their atmosphere and increase the number of visitors at brick–and–mortar points of sale (Pantano and Viassone, 2014). The augmented reality technologies along with the traditional store atmosphere variables can be carefully manipulated by retailers to positively influence store atmosphere perceptions. To provide answers on how these cues influence store impressions, Bigné et al. (2015) used virtual reality tools to simulate a store to investigate the influence of atmospherics on traffic paths, and Poncin and Mimoun (2014) showed that the in-store use of magic mirrors and interactive game terminals limits the barriers between traditional and online atmospherics. |