Main Problems Customers Face when Shopping Online: Findings by Recent Survey

Abstract

The recent increase of online stores increases consumer desire to buy a product without stepping out of the house. Although shopping online in Latvia is not as popular as elsewhere in Europe and the world-only 55% of Internet users in Latvia shop online-local internet stores face a lot of problems, from which delivery is the main one and it affects both-customers and companies. Delivery is important factor in creating trust to particular online store for customers and there are lot of external factors that influence delivery from company viewpoint. The aim of the research is to find the main problems customers face when shopping online, how delivery affects consumers' online store choice, and make comparisons with results in other countries. Research methods used: scientific publications studies, studies of statistics on internet shopping development, survey realised in Latvia at the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018 on internet shopping in cooperation with company iMarketing, University of Latvia and Chamber of Trade and Commerce of Latvia. For many aspects in the evaluation of opinion of respondents was used an evaluation scale 1-10, where 1-do not agree with the statement; 10-fully agree with statement. For data analysis there were used indicators of descriptive statistics, cross-tabulations, statistical tests of hypotheses and correlation analysis. Main results and findings of the study, theoretical and practical implications of the work: response rate of respondents was very high in comparison with other surveys, respondents have expressed also their suggestions for delivery from online stores. Main conclusions: people in Latvia mainly do not use internet for shopping, but if they do, they face several problems; delivery is one of them. Customers in Latvia are not willing to pay for delivery at all, even in the case if there is a possibility to receive the product on the day of the purchase. Also, the main factor that would 1 The research was supported by the project "INTERFRAME-LV".