A STUDY ON CONSUMER PERCEIVED RISK TOWARDS ONLINE SHOPPING IN SELECTED CITIES OF GUJARAT

Abstract

We are living a time of techno-savvy consumers that are connected 24 hrs, 7 days a week, for whom all information is a click away as a result, the consumer s pattern for shopping has changed. Now consumer is moving towards a new platform i.e. online shopping. Online shopping provides various benefits that consumer can derive. First, it saves time and efforts for today s time starved customer. Second it provides plenty of choices for wide category of items and also the ease of comparing the offerings from different vendors, only at the click of mouse. Another most important benefit is the significant discount provided by the e-retailers to attract the customers. Online shopping also provides global access of products and not bound with the global time differences. Online shopping opens a new world of opportunities and experiences for customers. The array of products and services that online shopping offers at different price range makes it an unbelievable market place. Most consumers have open heartedly adapted to online shopping while others have fear of various types of risks. These risks act as deterrent to online shopping. The main objective of research to study online perceived risk and its impact on consumers online purchase intentions. The study was also aimed to identify various influencing factors and their impact on online perceived risk. The study was conducted on 610 respondents from select cities of Gujarat namely Ahmedabad, Surat, Rajkot and Vadodara who were approached through both online and offline survey. Various factors of perceived risk were extracted through literature review and exploratory factor analysis. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to verify the factor structure of a set of observed variables. Their impacts were also studied with various types of perceived risk associated with online shopping. The respondents were government and private employees, students and businessmen. Their perceptions of Financial Risk, Performance Risk, Social Risk, Time Risk, Psychological Risk and Privac