MUSLIM CUSTOMER BEHAVIOR IN HALAL FOOD ONLINE PURCHASING

Abstract

While in general people perceive technology based on two major factors: its usefulness and ease of use (Davis, 1989), Muslim customers should consume the food and beverages allowed by the religion. Therefore, nowadays people could purchase anything online including halal food. This paper attempts to examine the Muslim customer behavior in purchasing halal food through online transaction. We modify the original TAM model to adjust to the Muslim customer. We collected the data via self-administered questionnaire, while Partial Least Square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to estimate the data. The result shows that perceived usefulness has positive significance to purchase intention. Consequently, religious knowledge has positive significance to habit. Moreover, religious knowledge has positive significant effect to halal label, but has negative significant effect to purchase intention. Otherwise, habit has a significant effect to purchase intention. In addition, perceived ease of use has positive effect to purchase intention. In contrast, halal label has positive insignificant influence to habit. Further, perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness has negative insignificant effect to habit. Furthermore, in this study we also tested habit as mediating variable, the result shows that habit partly mediates between religious knowledge and purchase intention. However, habit failed to mediate between independent variables (perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and halal label) and dependent variable (purchase intention). Moreover, halal label failed to mediate between religious knowledge and habit. However, further empirical investigation across generation and countries is necessary.