BRENDA POM Essay

NAME; Brenda NassaryCOURSE; POM

ASSIGNMENT; Term Paper

QUESTION;Product perception in the case of frequent online purchasers

INTRODUCTION

Background of the research problem

Online Purchasing is basically the use of internet or web browser to search and buy certain products. Internet can be accessed from electronic devices such as mobile phones, computers etc. hence users can browse through their phones to visit various shops in and outside their country of residence then purchase items and arrange for their delivery thereafter.

Commencement of online purchase is dated back in the 1960’s when the data interchange begun however research indicates that it took a real turn in 1995 after the introduction of Amazon and eBay which resulted to 16 million people to begin selling online, which was followed by other major events such as, Hotmail lunch in 1996 which grew the number of seller to 36 Million, USA donation of internet usage in 1997 causing the sellers to rise to 70 Million, the Google launch in 1998 impacted the market quite a lot and resulted for the number of sellers to 147 Million, by 2003 when apple launched iTunes Store sellers numbers grew further to 719 Million, in 2006 the sellers number hit 1,093 majorly enhanced with the improvement of social media, and the number kept growing to over 3 Billion in 2013 etc.

After a time, customers became deeply interested in online purchase because they were already used to spend more time in their phones or PCs hence the fact that they were able to shop in them allowed them to enjoy added convenience.

Research indicates that, estimated revenue purchase kept increasing constantly from $ 1,316 trillion in 2014 to $ 2,489 trillion in 2018, with most frequent buyers be ranked between the age of 18-29 as table 1 below indicated;

Online Shopping Frequency (By age)

Age Shop at least once a week Shop at least once a Month Shop at least once a Year

18-29 35% 41% 24%

30-39 37% 35% 28%

40-49 23% 35% 42%

50-64 17% 38% 45%

65+ 11% 31% 58%

Furthermore previous researchers have confirmed that, online purchasing is more popular in the UK where E-commerce contributed over 18% of the total sales in the year 2018 nevertheless, African countries have also been recording increase in online sales contribution continuously. This was mainly boosted by its convenience, elimination of distance factor (ability of people to purchase from other countries), and E-commerce acting like a one stop shop where virtually everything can be found online and at the comfort your home.

Henceforth, consumers’ perception was online purchase is the most efficient way to shop until the emergence of cyber-crime from having to share the financial information while initiating payment, the increase of these scams have made online purchases a chaos and this paper aims at analyzing how customers perceive online purchase even after emergence of the cybercrime.

Statement of the Problem, and appropriate hypothesis.

Ideally online shopping was invented to broaden users purchase base, it was perceived as a platform where one can browse through the websites of different vendors for the search of the product of interest, compare its price and quality, order the goods, enter payment details in a secured online payment platform and finally receive the good ordered as per delivery schedule indicates with the quality expected.

However massive technological development acted as a pathway for cybercrime, which involved hacking into accounts of the buyers and conduct unauthorized transactions, delivery of fake products or of a different quality from the one ordered etc. which made buyers lose confidence on the online system.

Research indicates that Africa loss USD 3.5 Billion to cybercriminals in 2017 compared to USD 2 Billion in 2016, the cybercrime review indicates that about 95% of African businesses operate with systems that are below in cyber security line. Most organizations have had to spend about USD 1500 annually for cyber security.

Driven from this information, this paper aims at critically and empirically analyzing whether there in a correlation between customers perception pre – post purchase and frequency of purchasing. Weather customers feel better & better after every online satisfaction or they feel threatened with every purchase made.

Developed Hypothesis

H0: there is no significant correlation between frequency of online purchasing and customers online purchase perception.

H1: There is a significant correlation between frequency of online purchasing and customers online purchase perception.

Objectives to be achieved

General Objective.

To examine whether customers’ perception is affected with frequency of their purchase

Specific objectives.

To analyze whether customers conduct online purchase

To examine the frequency of online purchase

To determine how customers perceive online purchase

To substantiate whether online purchase frequency affect customers perception

Methodology.

Data was collected through questionnaires, the questionnaires were prepared in three ways 1. Computerized questionnaires which comprised sending mails to the targeted respondents in far countries e.g. china and us as they rank top in countries that conduct online purchasing. 2. Telephone questionnaires which targeted respondents who are have massive knowledge of the online purchase perception and do not have enough time to fill papers and answer mails. 3. In-house survey where questionnaire papers was distributed to targeted respondents here in Tanzania those aged between 18 – 40.

The questions was structured as a semi open questionnaire where respondents could give slight explanations about their responses.

The questionnaire composed 30 questions in three sections the first was to taste preference of people to conduct online purchase and their frequency, second section was focused on analyzing how customers perceive the online purchase in terms of quality of the products delivered, safety of the card details after purchase, website design and etc. Third section focused on analyzing whether frequency of online purchase affect people’s perception on trust worthiness on the process and pre & post purchase satisfaction.

A pilot survey was also conducted to analyze how well the respondents understood the questionnaire to be sure answers are accurate.

  CATEGORY COUNT PERCENTAGE

Gender Male 50 50

Female 65 50

Age 18-29 30 26%

30-39 40 35%

40-49 20 17%

50-64 15 13%

65+ 10 9%

Level of Education Did not complete secondary school 10 9%

Completed secondary school 7 6%

Completed undergraduate degree 60 52%

Completed postgraduate degree 38 33%

Respondents’ profile LINK Excel.Sheet.12 “Book1” “Sheet1!R2C1:R13C4” a f 4 h * MERGEFORMAT

Results and Discussion

Research was conducted to confirm a probability of 0.95 confidence level in testing the hypothesis developed above, analyzing whether there is a correlation between the frequencies of online purchase and customer perception.

Based on the result achieved, there is an empirical support of the null hypothesis which indicates that 95% of the responses accepted the null hypothesis.

Conclusion