Virtualization of Poles’ buying behavior duringthe COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract: Technological development has resulted in the digitization of many areas of life. The modern society is particularly defined as the “information society”, because of the fact that most of their activities take place on the Internet and thus the society is information-dependent. The introduced governmental sanitary restrictions (also in terms of the functioning of the economy) to limit the spread of the coronavirus caused that life has shifted to a greater extent to the Internet sphere. The aim of the study is to determine the potential impact of a pandemic on the virtualization of buying behavior. The con- ducted research is exploratory in nature and constitutes a valuable starting point for po- tential further directions of analyzes. The results of this study showed that excavating the topic of the impact of the pandemic on buying behavior in the area of consumption vir- tualization is justified, because in all the analyzed product categories there was a statisti- cally significant change in the form of purchases. Keywords: virtualization, buying behavior, customer behavior, pandemic, COVID-19. JEL Classification: D10, D12, E21