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Purpose: This paper explores the differences in behaviour of 50 shoppers aged 20–69 on a women's fashion retail website to address whether older users behave differently to younger users when shopping online. Method: An eye-tracking experiment and qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 50 female participants, aged 20–69, comparing ‘younger’, ‘mid’ and ‘older’ consumers. Findings: Compared to younger users, older users took longer to navigate the website and spent longer on web pages. They had more scattered viewing patterns, looked at the thumbnail images in less detail as they scrolled, used the search bar less and selected more options to refine their search. Originality: An increasing number of older users now shop online. However, ecommerce research is often based on younger users. This study fills a gap in the literature by providing a rich understanding of whether older users behave differently to younger users when shopping online, and whether standard fashion retail website designs are excluding older users. The findings have practical implications for fashion ecommerce websites targeting different ages.

Social media influencers (SMIs) as significant stakeholders are increasingly collaborating with brands to cultivate marketing campaigns. However, literature concerning the narrative strategies used by SMIs to create electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) to introduce brands and products remains under-theorised. This research takes a theoretical perspective of marketing communication, advances the eWOM theory to develop SMIs’ eWOM model as the theoretical lens, and adopts semiotic and rhetorical approaches to identify SMIs’ narrative strategies to create eWOM to promote brands and products to consumers. By conducting a netnographic study to observe fashion bloggers’ messages concerning Western luxury brands on Chinese social media, this research identified six distinct narrative strategies that are different in linking the purpose of eWOM, assigning brands with roles in eWOM, representing the meanings associated with brands, and using modes of persuasion to convince consumers to accept these meanings. This research also proposes a model to illustrate the structure of SMIs’ narrative strategies. The results of this research have implications for the advancement of social media marketing theories and provide a foundation for future development of knowledge regarding SMIs’ narrative strategies.

Social media influencers (SMIs) are increasingly involving in influencer marketing to promote products. However, there are both opportunities and issues with influencer marketing. SMIs’ narrative strategies can be of great value as high-quality eWOM content is vital to maintain influencer marketing effectiveness. This paper adopts the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework to explore the value of SMIs’ narrative strategies to overcome potential influencer marketing issues within the context of China's luxury market. A qualitative approach is applied to explore Chinese consumer perceptions toward capabilities of three SMIs’ narrative strategies (brand attribute evaluation, brand love inspiration, self-identity construction) to deal with the issues of cultural barriers, commercial–personal tension, and sponsorship disclosure in SMIs’ eWOM. Based on the research findings, this paper develops a conceptual model to illustrate how SMIs’ narrative strategies benefit the cultivation of influencer marketing on social media.

Social media influencers (SMIs) as significant stakeholders are increasingly collaborating with brands to cultivate marketing campaigns. However, literature concerning the narrative strategies used by SMIs to create electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) to introduce brands and products remains under-theorised. This research takes a theoretical perspective of marketing communication, advances the eWOM theory to develop SMIs’ eWOM model as the theoretical lens, and adopts semiotic and rhetorical approaches to identify SMIs’ narrative strategies to create eWOM to promote brands and products to consumers. By conducting a netnographic study to observe fashion bloggers’ messages concerning Western luxury brands on Chinese social media, this research identified six distinct narrative strategies that are different in linking the purpose of eWOM, assigning brands with roles in eWOM, representing the meanings associated with brands, and using modes of persuasion to convince consumers to accept these meanings. This research also proposes a model to illustrate the structure of SMIs’ narrative strategies. The results of this research have implications for the advancement of social media marketing theories and provide a foundation for future development of knowledge regarding SMIs’ narrative strategies.