Does the Perceived Quality of an Electronic Grocery Store Explain the Buying Behavior of Its Customers?

Abstract

Grocery shopping has been suggested as one potential application area for e-commerce (Kutz, 1998). Yet, groceries are one of the most difficult areas of trade for e-commerce, because they are local, the physical delivery aspect is critical, an average purchase basket consists of many items and the value-to-weight ratio of purchases is low (Heikkila et al., 1998; Raijas and Tuunainen, 2001). On the other hand, groceries form the largest section of retailing, shopping is frequent, buying patterns are fairly stable, and the shopping behavior of most customers is more or less habitual and automatic, being based on earlier experiences (Raijas and Tuunainen, 2001). Assuming that grocery shopping is quite routine, it probably does not have the same enjoyment aspect (Dawson et al., 1990) as shopping in fashion boutiques, electronics shops, or antique bookstores, for example. Therefore there is a great potential for electronic grocery stores (Raijas and Tuunainen, 2001). Nevertheless, Geuens et al. (2003) found that Belgian consumers are still very conservative as far as their grocery shopping is concerned, although they do not like it. Grewal et al. (2004) also report that despite a prominent start, home grocery deliveries now appear to have somewhat fizzled out. All these factors make online groceries intellectually an interesting application area for e-commerce, although perhaps not economic successes. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the real buying behavior of electronic grocery store customers, and especially the impact of perceived quality of a grocery store on this behavior. Electronic grocery shopping may be interpreted quite widely as a facility enabling consumers to order groceries from home electronically (by phone, fax or Internet)