The impact of risk factors on South African consumers’ attitude towards online shopping

Online shopping has been an increasing trend worldwide, especially in countries with a welldeveloped infrastructure for online marketing activities. Online shopping involves purchasing goods and services over the internet (Malapane 2019:1). Consumers can now conveniently purchase products from anywhere, at any time (Arora & Sahney 2018:1040), with an abundance of information. Given the benefits of online shopping, online transactions’ high cart abandonment rates remain a concern (Statista 2020). This is because consumers often prefer to shop at physical retailers because of the ability to touch and feel products physically, instant possession, online distrust and the perceived risk associated with online purchases (Arora & Sahney 2018:1040). Because of these concerns, online shopping is used to make price and product feature comparisons; however, the decision and actual purchases are made in store, after the physical evaluation (Wolny & Charoensuksai 2014:324). This challenge presents an opportunity for online retailers and marketing practitioners to evaluate further the impact that perceived risk has on online buying behaviour and to comprehend online shopping through consumers’ eyes. This is supported by Yang, Sarathy and Lee (2016:75), who stated that future research should take a more consumer-centric approach and try to understand better the impact of online shopping risk factors on consumers’ purchasing behaviour.