Factors Influencing Customers’ Attitude Towards Online Shopping: Evidence from Dhaka City

The e-commerce sector in Bangladesh is quite prospective for e-marketers since it is a means for business growth. Undoubtedly, the knowledge on the factors affecting buyers’ behavior, the relationships between these factors and the type of online buyers would give assistance to the e-marketers in evolving their marketing strategies. This paper focuses on factors influencing online buyers’ attitude based on the evidence from buyers of Dhaka city. It also investigates how different types of online buyers perceive websites differently. Data used in this study was obtained using an interviewer-administered structured questionnaire on 199 respondents, selected randomly having experience in online purchasing. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted to factorize seventeen variables along with ANOVA techniques in order to test different hypotheses. Website reliability, website design, website customer service and website competency are the four dominant factors which influence consumer perceptions of online purchasing. The five types of online buyers, namely, prospective, trial, occasional, frequent and regular online buyers; perceived the four website factors differently except for website design. These buyers have similar evaluations of website design but different evaluations of website reliability and security issues, which imply that security or privacy issues are important to most online buyers. The challenge of converting low frequency online consumers into regular consumers can be encountered by properly addressing concerns about reliable performance, security and design.