Customer Online Shopping Experience

Introduction

Shopping has a significant place in human life (Emidi, 2021: 7). Customers in the shopping process; It is exposed to countless brands that aim to meet the same needs and offer products with similar quality and price (Carmo et al., 2022: 1). Shopping for the customer has come out of the process of just obtaining a preferred product or service and has become a social experience (Terblanche, 2018: 49). Since the emergence of the idea that consuming or purchasing a product involves a series of activities valued by customers, the concept of experience has taken on an important role for businesses (Carmo et al., 2022: 3). Marketing professionals need to look for new opportunities that will attract customers, aiming to establish a bond between the customer and the brand (Carmo et al., 2022: 1). Nowadays businesses have shifted their focus towards attracting and retaining valuable customers rather than increasing their sales, and they are aware that the key to success is related to providing great shopping experiences to their customers (Anshu et al., 2022: 3). Because today's customers often expect an interactive, versatile, and holistic shopping experience that entertains them, affects them emotionally, and encourages creativity (Terblanche, 2018: 49).

Nowadays, which we can describe as the age of experience, customer experience is one of the concepts that gain importance in the marketing discipline. Unlike traditional marketing, which relies on customers to make rational decisions, experiential marketing deals with customers' intelligence, senses, intellect, and emotions. Experiential marketing aims to establish and deepen relationships with customers by offering interactive, exciting, meaningful, and memorable experiences with their products and services (Dimirieska & Efremova, 2021: 140). Therefore, a better customer experience is essential to ensure customer satisfaction, which is the key element for businesses to compete in market conditions. Every interaction an organization has with customers and employees creates an experience. The experience can be positive or negative, but emotions are always produced as a result. Every interaction is very important to ensure that customer expectations and requests are met and to create lasting relationships. Positive relationships enable customer value to grow, employees to thrive, and users to be enthusiastic (Joshi, 2018: 1).

As the ways of reaching and establishing relationships with customers have diversified in the globalizing world, the shopping experiences offered by companies for customers have begun to differentiate (Pleyers & Poncin, 2020), and the way people experience both virtual and physical environments have changed through rapidly developing technologies (Flavian et al., 2019: 547). The customer shopping experience has partially or completely shifted to the digital world (Kawaf & Tagg, 2017: 223). This change; customers do not aim to visit physical stores, but prefer to benefit from technology through the online features of the retail organizations (Eneizan, 2020: 2554). Therefore, the validity of all processes applied in physical stores has decreased in digital stores, and businesses have sought different ways to interact with customers.