Just a mere existence of peer shoppers affects customers’ emotional as well as cognitive responses towards the store environment (e.g., Argo, Dahl, & Manchanda, 2005). The size of an in-store mere social presence, or retail density, has received a significant research interest in traditional retail settings (e.g., van Rompay et al., 2012). Then, would a similar idea of mere social presence exist in Web-based environments, affecting shoppers? Fashion retail websites provide similar numeric cues signaling traffic, or virtual density, of their websites, such as viewer number cues (hereafter VNC)
