Perceptions towards Online Shopping: Analyzing the Greek University Students’ Attitude

Abstract

The sharp increase of Internet usage, as well as, the systematic progress of Information Technology have transformed the way goods are bought and sold, resulting to the exponential growth in the number of online shoppers. However, a lot of differences regarding online purchases have been revealed due to the various consumers’ characteristics and the types of provided products and services. Therefore, understanding who are the ones consuming and why they choose to use or avoid the Internet as a distribution channel, is a vital issue for both e-commerce managers and consumer theorists. The scope of this paper is to examine the perceptions of Greek university students’ adopters and non-adopters of online shopping in terms of demographic profile, expectations of online stores, advantages and problems related to online purchases. Moreover, the reasons for using or avoiding online shopping, as well as, the types of preferred products were studied. The research provides interesting insights on the online consumer behaviour, as the results show significant differences between the two groups of respondents