The rapid expansion of e-commerce has reshaped the luxury market, making digital channels strategically unavoidable. While prior research highlights risks that online distribution poses to luxury values such as exclusivity and symbolic meaning, empirical evidence linking channel-specific assortment strategies to brand value remains limited. This study analyses the relationship between e-commerce assortment deployment and brand value, focusing on official (brand-owned) e-commerce (hereafter, official e-commerce) versus third-party e-commerce. The analysis covers seven leading luxury brands—Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Chanel, Gucci, Dior, Prada, and Fendi—selected from the BrandZ 2025 global top-ten luxury ranking. Data were collected from brands’ official Japanese e-commerce sites and six major global third-party platforms. Brand value was operationalised using BrandZ scores. A two-stage approach was employed: principal component analysis (PCA) to identify latent patterns of assortment deployment, followed by fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine configurations associated with high brand value. PCA reveals two dimensions: a “third-party e-commerce restraint–expansion” axis and an “entry expansion–selective assortment” axis within official e-commerce. fsQCA indicates that high brand value is achieved not by any single factor but by restraint in third-party e-commerce SKUs and discounting. These findings suggest that luxury brand value in digital environments depends less on quantitative expansion than on strategic control over assortments and channels, offering implications for managing official and third-party e-commerce in luxury contexts.
Fukunaga et al. (Thu,) studied this question.