The impact of mobile shopping applications on women's buying behavior towards ready-made garments: A systematic literature review

Abstract

India's mobile commerce (m-commerce) ecosystem has undergone transformative growth over the past decade, with the annual volume of online shoppers projected to reach 425 million by 2027, up from approximately 185 million in 2021. Women constitute a disproportionately active and commercially significant segment of this growth, particularly in the ready-made garment category, which consistently ranks as the highest-volume online purchase segment among female consumers. Despite this commercial significance, the academic literature on the specific mechanisms through which mobile shopping applications shape women's garment-buying behavior in the Indian context remains dispersed and undertheorized. This systematic literature review synthesizes empirical and conceptual research published between 2012 and 2023, drawing on peer-reviewed journal articles, institutional reports, and industry databases, to identify the principal enabling factors, inhibiting factors, and platform-specific dynamics that characterize women's mobile app-mediated garment shopping in India. The review identifies six recurrent enabling factors across the synthesized literature: convenience and temporal flexibility, price competitiveness and promotional offerings, product variety and visual accessibility, ease of comparison, doorstep delivery logistics, and app-exclusive rewards and personalization. Two primary inhibiting factors emerge consistently: security and trust concerns relating to payment data and personal information, and the sensory deficit of virtual garment evaluation relative to physical retail. The landscape of leading platforms—Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Ajio, Snapdeal—is mapped against their functional differentiation strategies. Implications for retailers, app developers, and policymakers seeking to optimize the female m-commerce experience in India are discussed, and a research agenda identifying underexplored dimensions of this phenomenon is proposed.