Customer acceptance of internet shopping in India: impact of shopping orientations, knowledge and security

Abstract

Customer acceptance of innovations necessitates behavioral research aimed at examining and predicting behavior and behavioral intentions. Due to low penetration of internet in India (around 4% according to Business Today, 5.2% according to Nasscom’s projection for 2005 and 7.1% in November 2008 according to internet World Stats’ usage and populations statistics) as compared to other countries (China 22.4%, Taiwan 66.1%), internet shopping can be considered as an innovation for the Indian customer. Customer demand for the internet is a key factor that may ultimately drive widespread acceptance of the internet by retailers. Whether the customer has access and how they use or perceive internet shopping in a way will affect its ultimate acceptance (Shirky, 1997). Therefore, this study examines internet shopping acceptance in developing countries; in this case India. The exponential growth of internet penetration in India and increased e-commerce activity both on consumer side as well as corporate side during last few years provides the impetus to investigate this phenomenon among potential online shoppers. The study tests a comprehensive Technology Acceptance Model incorporating shopping profiles and security and privacy concerns exploring their effects on successful adoption of internet shopping in India. The study is divided into various chapters. Chapter 1 presents the review of the literature in various sections. The first section presents the literature on Theories relevant to predicting and explaining behavior. The second section presents the analysis of customer research. The last section presents the literature on shopping orientations. The review of the literature is instrumental in identification of the research gaps, which are discussed in Chapter 2. This is followed by the presentation of the model for the study; the research objectives, and the hypotheses which are also part of Chapter 2. Based on the literature review and research gaps, the proposed model focuses mainly on incorporating Shopping Orientations and Security/Privacy concerns to the original Technology Acceptance Model. Chapter 3 is the Method section of the study. The operational definitions of the variables in the study are discussed first, followed by discussion of the scales used in the study. This is followed by the data-collection methodology and the details about the sample. The chapter closes by discussing the descriptive characteristics of the sample. Not surprisingly the age-group 25-34 was the most represented age-group. Chapter 4 describes the results of the study. The student version 12.0 of the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was used for the statistical computation and the analyses under this section. The categorical variables, for example, age, gender, educational qualification, etc. were coded before data entry. Continuous variables were entered into the excel sheet (MS Office Excel 2003) as they had been responded to onto the questionnaires. The hypotheses were tested using statistical tools like Canonical Correlation Analysis and Simple and Multiple Regression. The results section consists of the presentation of the findings for the study in two major sections, with their sub-sections.