Money Invested on Shopping Online and Payment Methods Used: Findings by Recent Survey

Abstract

Within development of telecommunication, e-commerce is rapidly replacing traditional shopping as well as offering new ways to pay for goods. Payment is one of the main phases of buying decision process and it is crucial to e-commerce, because there is a big possibility that consumer will abandon the shopping cart if preferred payment method is not available. Not only flexible payment options can help company to attract and retain customers, but it also can ensure that company get paid more quickly. The aim of the research is to find out how much money Latvian customers invest when shopping online and which payment methods they use to pay for the purchase on internet in Latvia. Research methods used in the study are scientific publication studies, studies of statistics on internet shopping development, survey realised in Latvia at the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018 on internet shopping in co-operation with company iMarketing, University of Latvia and Chamber of Trade and Commerce of Latvia. For many aspects in evaluation of opinion of respondents it was used evaluation scale 1–10, where do not agree with the statement; 10 – fully agree with statement. For data analysis there were used indicators of descriptive statistics, cross – tabulations, statistical tests of hypotheses, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and correlation analysis. Main results and findings of the study reveals that the most commonly used payment methods for online purchases in Latvia are paying with debit or credit card at the moment of purchase and paying at the store, but the least used payment methods for online purchase is cryptocurrency and at the pick-up box place. Also, there is no statistical difference between female and male customers on use of credit or debit card usage for online payments.