The Changing Landscape of Online Shopping: Exploring Motivations and Behaviors in Online Buying

Abstract

The emergence of online retailing and penetration of internet in India mushroomed new online retailers and marketers as well as brought competition for growth and survival. The growing population and changing lifestyle of youth in India make it crucial for the Indian online retailers to recognize the consumer’s inspirations, source of idea and information behind buying a specific product over internet and online sites. So, this research explores the Indian online consumers inspiration for online shopping and uncovers the three major sources of idea and inspiration that persuade young online consumers to purchase specific product and to further analyze the impact of consumer’s demographic variables like age, gender and education level on their source of idea and inspiration for buying online. With this aim, the study was conducted on online shoppers and results reveal that for Indian online consumers, most prominent source of idea and information for buying a specific product online is advertisement. Social media networks like Facebook, Twitter etc. and recommendations of friend/family member were other major sources of idea and inspiration regarding buying a specific product over the internet. The significant association was also found between respondent’s gender and source of idea and inspiration for online shopping. Females majorly get their idea and inspiration of buying a specific product online by advertisement and male get the idea and inspiration from the social networks.