Data Security Breach as Perceived Risk and its Influence on Consumer Purchase Decision

Abstract

Financial data breaches incidents have increased even with the advancements in information security and complex encryptions. Debit card or credit card hacks leads to the loss of consumer's private information which is a serious setback to the trust of consumers on their decision to purchase online. This study focuses on evaluating the influence of data security breach as perceived risk on consumer purchase decision. Another aspect of this study is to find out the awareness among consumers of different age groups about the importance of having third party security seals on the e-commerce website. A self-administered questionnaire was adapted for the purpose of fulfilling the research objectives and was distributed among 200 students who are using credit or debit cards as a payment method in a cosmopolitan area. The findings of this study show that data security breach as perceived risk has a negative impact on purchase decision of consumers in the context of online shopping.