Impacts of Health and Safety Concerns on E-Commerce and Service Reconfiguration during COVID-19 Pandemic: Insights from an Emerging Economy

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a surge in online shopping and e-commerce activities as governments imposed social isolation orders and consumers were advised to avoid large crowds and limit physical interactions. Building upon the notion of trust and digital safety in online activities, we develop a new construct to measure consumers’ health and safety concerns and examine its impact on online shopping and e-commerce activities. We collected primary data from a self-administered survey examining whether and how e-commerce and online shopping activities changed during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in Vietnam. We identify factors that are associated with increases in online shopping and e-commerce activities during the period and study firms’ reconfiguration of businesses and services to cope with consumers’ behavioral changes. We show that online “connectedness” and Technology Readiness are important factors that drive the increases in online shopping during the pandemic. More importantly, after controlling for these factors, health and safety concerns also have a positive influence, and the impact is stronger for elder consumers compared to the younger ones. Our empirical findings are validated by companies’ practices, showing that businesses and services could survive and even benefit from this difficult pandemic period by quickly reinventing themselves to better address customers’ health and safety concerns. Our results also suggest promising signs for the post-pandemic recovery and even expansion as firms should leverage the increasing trend of elder consumers, who are more vulnerable and concerned about health and safety but traditionally less “connected” and technology savvy.