The Impacts of Descriptive Norms on the Acceptance of Online Retail Stores

Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) has been applied to study customer's purchase intentions and actual purchase behaviours from online retail vendors by the researchers. UTAUT, conceived to predict the mandatory adoption of office technologies, posits social influences as an individual's perception that the important others think he/she should use an information technology artefact and motivation to comply with the shared social meaning of its use because of its promising social rewards and punishments. When UTAUT has been extended to online shopping context, the social pressure conceptualized in terms injunctive norms has become an inconsistent construct. On the other hand, it was found that an individual's perception what is commonly done around he/she forms the descriptive norms and these norms also motivate the focal behaviour by providing evidence of what is likely to adaptive. Therefore, the aim of this study is to assess the influences of descriptive norms on the acceptance of online retail store fronts. In order to test the hypothesized effects, a sample of 483 Turkish online shoppers using the biggest general merchandise online retailer in Turkey, 'hepsiburada.com', was surveyed by employing a self-administrated paper and pencil survey. The snowball sampling technique was preferred to form the study sample. The Partial Least Squares (PLS) was used for the identification and evaluation of the research model. The results indicated that descriptive norms also exert positive direct influences on behavioural intention construct simultaneously with injunctive norms. However, the regarded influences seem to be stronger than that of injunctive norms. The moderating effects of age and experience on descriptive norm-behavioural intention link were found to be significant too. The contributions of study results to both theory and practice were discussed at the end of the paper. Finally, it was provided some directions for the prospective research.