Online Shopping Characteristics and Their Influence on Female Buying Behavior

Abstract

Female online shoppers in the Indian e-commerce industry are growing day by day and the online vendors need to understand their shopping habits to approach them in a better way. A conceptual model is proposed that extends the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) model with three additional constructs namely, trust, convenience, and customer service. The proposed model is examined by means of questionnaire responses collected from around 529 online shoppers. The study reveals that customer service has the major influence on the female's attitude to shop online and perceived behavioural control acts as the most influencing factor in female shoppers' willingness to buy online. The overall descriptive power of the proposed model has an R2 of 52% for female's willingness to use online shopping and an R2 of 46% for attitude towards online shopping. Since it is difficult to attract new shoppers and retain existing customers, excellent customer service can be the answer to the problems related to customer retention and customer loyalty in the online context.