age group
Internet shops often have their blogs and social medias have easy links from and to their websites. By providing this connection, it shows the brand is current and on trend. Social media is good for both ensuring customers come back to the store and also attracting new ones. Since these platforms are proven to be popular with young generations, stores often find the majority of sales coming from this age range. Older generations are reluctant to purchase online, due to not trusting the websites, therefore a store with an older generation clientele would find it more profitable to stay on the high street,as they have the demand.
For example Miss Guided, Asos, Very and Boohoo
A Limitation for a high street store is confiding their range of consumers to ones in the local area. Whereas an online store has a web address able to reach audiences nationally or even internationally.
Due to the decline in interest in high street stores, brands are seeing a decline in footfall. This is making it not financially viable to have the stores open due to high fixed rent costs being paid monthly. Lots of factors can affect the footfall of a store like weather conditions, demonstrations, poor visual merchandising, bad reputation/ customer service and seasonal factors (e.g after Christmas).
advantages
Most of these factors wouldn't affect sales within an online store, like visual merchandising, and some, like weather conditions, can even be a plus for online brands as people are demoralised and make impulse purchases when the weather is bad.
An online store is a collection of mini profiles of each product, displaying garments on a manakin and modelled. It provides close up viewing by having a zoom feature so the consumer can fully examine the product. It provides information about care of the product and the fabric content, to fully educate the consumer. Often brands will even add a feature to their website to show you items the garment can be matched with to create a look, encouraging further sales.