PREDICTING CONSUMERS' PROBABILITY TO PURCHASE A PRODUCT ONLINE USING DISCRIMINANT ANALYSIS
Keywords:
Online Shopping, Need Recognition, Information Search, Evaluation of alternatives, Social MediaAbstract
India has experienced a transformation in the field of retailing. Earlier, the retail sector in India was made up of organized retail and unorganized retail. But recently, a new phenomenon has occurred in the field of retailing. This is Online retailing or e-tailing. This is most likely the future of shopping in the world. With the widespread use of internet and change in the socio-economic structure, India has emerged as the ideal place for online retailing. Increased internet penetration, improved security measures, convenience, less time consumption and extensive choice are a few factors that are attracting more and more consumers to shop online. In this paper, an attempt has been made to predict the probability that an online consumer will purchase a product online. A structured questionnaire was used to collect the relevant data from online consumers of Visakhapatnam city. On the basis of data collected from 856 respondents, six factors emerged contributing to predict the probability of a consumer to purchase online. Discriminant analysis was then applied with these six factors as dependent variables, and the probability to purchase online as independent variable. The study shows clearly that 'evaluation of alternatives' is the most important discriminating factor among the predictors considered in this study which differentiates the online consumers with low probability to purchase online from the online consumers with high probability to purchase online.
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