Antecedents to Online Shopping: Factors Influencing the Selection of Web Portal

The increased use of smartphones and tablets, along with advanced security features being offered by the online retailers are adding strength to e-commerce industry. Growing at an astonishing rate at 85%, as against 65% growth of regular shopping over the previous year, internet retailing in India touched US $10.672 billion in 2013, making it one of the most anticipated destinations for national and multinational online retailers. Several web portals are looking to capture a share of this huge market. This study gains importance as Indian arms of multinational online selling companies like Amazon and eBay are fighting various home-grown players like Snapdeal, Flipkart and many more. The objective of this paper is to identify and rank the factors that influence the selection of web portal among online shoppers in India. Exploratory study was conducted to identify various precursors of web site selection for online shopping. Twenty-four variables identified from this study were used to create a structured questionnaire. This questionnaire was then administered among 203 shoppers in India using convenience sampling. To determine the factors that influence the selection of web portals. Principal Component Analysis with Varimax Rotation was used. The study condensed the comprehensive set of twenty-four variables into six factors that have a direct influence on consumers' choice of online buying website. These were transaction security, augmented benefits, user experience, cognitive stimuli, personalized assurance and web atmospherics. This is against the general perception that shoppers prefer the web portals with best user experience and attractive web atmospherics. The online buying population of the world's third largest economy selects the portals based on the primary motive of security in a transaction. Adding to the existing knowledge on shoppers' selection of online buying portals, the study reveals the prevalence of a multitude of antecedent factors and distinct patterns with respect to constituents of these factors. Findings of this research may be used as guidelines for the development of multi-dimensional strategic framework by online retailing firms.