Why not with the flow? A case of online shoppers in Pakistan toward online shopping
Muhammad Bilal Mustafa Mishal Nafees Shafaq Aftab
AbstractWith the expeditious growth of technology, Online shopping trend escalate its roots in all over the world. In many countries, conventional markets have been shifted to digital markets or still shifting for the sake to make shopping process more efficient and sophisticated as well as to minimize inputs and maximize the profits. Similarly, today shoppers’ taste has been changed from traditional way of shopping to online shopping and/or still changing in all over the world because online shopping is more convenient, more effective and cost saving than traditional way of shopping. But in Pakistan research highlights that majority of the shoppers behave differently toward online shopping as comparative to shoppers in western or developed countries, they are still preferring traditional way of shopping unlike shoppers in western countries. So aim of this paper is to fill this research gap by addressing this issue as well as to identify the actual reasons behind this contrast behavior of Pakistani shoppers toward online shopping as comparative to shoppers in western countries. Besides we also identify those factors that could encourage or discourage shoppers toward online shopping in Pakistan. To address above research problems, we conducted five in-depth interviews and three focus groups, thorough which we found that “Trust deficit” and “lack of awareness” are the two major reasons behind the contrasting behavior of Pakistani shoppers toward online shopping. Whereas “services quality”, “product Quality”, “Legislation” and “word of mouth” are the major factors that could encourage or discourage shoppers toward online shopping in Pakistan.