Abstract
Purpose – Shopping motivation has been extensively explored in traditional marketing context but less in online shopping. Utilitarian attribute of online shopping is one of the success factors of e-retailing. The purpose of this paper is to explore the utilitarian shopping motivation in online shopping and validate these factors through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) in the Indian context. Design/methodology/approach – The data were collected from the 183 regular online shoppers. The collected data were analysed through exploratory factor analysis and CFA using Amos 22 version. Findings – This paper explored the utilitarian shopping motivation of online shopping into five factors, i.e. information availability, accessibility, searchability, product availability and convenience. Research limitations/implications – The research is conducted on online shoppers to measure their utilitarian motives of shopping online. Further research may be conducted to investigate other motives of online shopping. The sample is taken from Central India which is not enough to generalise the findings. Research may be conducted in other regions and on different segment of respondents to know the impact of geographical variance on utilitarian perspectives of online shoppers. Originality/value – This paper addresses a significant input in online retailing platform, and it will contribute to the theory of shopping motivations in online shopping context and provide valuable inputs for developing online marketing strategies. The findings of the study also aid to retail practitioners in analysing retailing’s current transformation due to digitalization.
Discussion
Beyond other investigated predictors, information available, accessibility, product availability, searchability and convenience are strong motivation factors towards online shopping. This study explores five utilitarian motivation factors, namely, information available, accessibility, product availability, searchability and convenience to be important factors that affect online shopping in India. The most contributing factor in this study is information available. Information is the most important aspect of any decision-making process, whether it is engaging the customers in browsing or force them to buy the product or service. Availability of adequate information on a website (Close and Kinney, 2010; Shim et al., 2001) may convert the browsing into buying. The information related to company and product is important to customers (Kaur and Quareshi, 2015) and for customer support services. Moreover, it enables the shoppers to gather information about products without the necessity of placing the items of interest (Close and Kinney, 2010). Additionally, clearly stated information about warranty & guarantee or product return on website motivates customer towards online shopping (Upadhyay and Kaur, 2013).
