Adoption Of Self-Checkouts In Fast Moving Consumer Goods Purchase Among Young Consumers In Croatia

Development of information and communication technology has caused major changes in the retail market. Retailers are forced to internationalize their business and introduce innovations in assortment, way of serving, delivery and payment. That creates space, and the need for introducing technological innovations such as self-service technology in retail. Today’s consumers are willing to spend less time in store, and for that short time, they require more information about the products they want to buy. The main motive to introduce self-service technology in the store is to provide customers better services and enable easier and faster shopping. The most prevalent form of selfservice technology in stores are self-service cash registers (self-checkouts). Self-checkout is device on which consumers scan the products they want to buy, place them into bags and pay the bill all by themselves. The purpose of the paper is to explore the adoption of self-checkouts in fast moving consumer goods purchase among young consumers in Croatia. In order to detect the acceptance of self-checkout by the Croatian consumers, reasons to use or not use self-checkout and collect ideas for possible improvements, survey was conducted by focus groups. For a better comparison and analysis of the data survey respondents were divided into users and non-users of self-checkouts and all results and conclusions are interpreted on an aggregate level. The issues discussed in the focus group concerned: (1) personality and technological readiness of self-checkout users and nonusers; (2) consumers purchasing frequency and payment method; (3) security of personal data; (4) technical errors; (5) the perceived influence of self-checkout on sales staff reductions; (6) the ability to improve self-checkout and (7) knowledge and usage of other self-service retail technologies. Analysing the results of the research, obtained conclusion is that self-checkouts are not fully accepted by the Croatian consumers and that they consider it as auxiliary register. One of the main reasons for unacceptance of self-checkouts is frequent technical failures which occur and because of that there is large space for improvement of self-checkout technology. The main limitation of the conducted research is the limitation of the research method itself. With a desire of deeper understanding and achievement of research goals, it is proposed in the future to conduct a quantitative research in shops that have self-checkouts. The scientific contribution and value of research is reflected in the deep exploration and analysis of the acceptance of self-checkouts for the purchase of fast moving consumer goods among young consumers in Croatia.