A Research on Customers’ Attitudes and Their Preferences Toward Online Shopping Vis-à-vis Offline Shopping with Special Reference to Electric and Electronic Products in India

Abstract

The increasing no. of netizens in India is likely to increase the chances of online shopping being successful in India. In the present era, it is believed that online shopping has become a popular mode of shopping for the customers because of their changing attitudes and adoption of technological change. With this belief marketers in India are busy in studying customers’ attitudes toward online shopping vis-à-vis offline shopping so that they can devise their strategies to satisfy their target customers. The present research study is undertaken to measure and compare customers' attitudes toward online shopping and offline shopping and study their preferred shopping mode for electric and electronic products. This study includes the use of Fishbein’s Multi-attributes Attitude Model to measure the attitude of individual customers through the semantic differential rating scale. After calculating the attitude scores, z-Test for sample means is applied for the meaningful comparison of average attitude scores obtained for two samples of online shopping scores and offline shopping scores. Proportions of customers preferring online and offline shopping modes are compared by using z- test. The extent of the population selected for the investigation is geographical boundaries of Dehradun city of Uttarakhand state in India. Statistical analysis of collected data infers that there is evidence of customers’ more favorable attitudes toward online shopping vis-a-vis offline shopping for electric and electronic products and that almost half of the population of customers prefers to shop electric and electronic products online.