ASSESSING THE FACTORS AFFECTING TO CUSTOMER ADOPTION FOR ONLINE SHOPPING PLATFORMS IN SRI LANKA WITH A MODERATING IMPACT OF CULTURE

Abstract

This Study mainly investigates the factors which directly affect customer adoption for online shopping in Sri-lanka. The researcher identified that, there is a clear gap between people who adapt and people who refused to adopt to the online shopping concept. This gap taken as the research problem. “Online shopping concept is rapidly covering all over the world and people rapidly tend to adopt it. These reasons or factors are a different person to person. There are different reasons for the adaption to use online shopping facilities. Different researches have been found different reasons for the adaptions. In many countries, this application has been used due to its easiness, time-saving advantage, Culture prevailing in the countries and etc. When it comes to the Sri Lankan context, the e-commerce business has grown rapidly in 2019, with a big percentage of shoppers stepping onto the digital platform. In this pandemic situation, people tend to doing transactions based on online platforms. Later on, people reduced their online shopping usage and again getting used to do physical shopping when the Covid -19 pandemic situation got normal for the country. Study is going to find out factors which Sri Lankan customers prefer to adapt to online shopping with a moderate impact of the culture. Since the topic is new to the sri-lankan content researcher found some similar literatures which has done to the different countries. Further The study has used the UTAUT Model, which has been proved model for technological researches. In the literature review, the independent factors identified as performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influences, facilitating conditions, service quality. The dependent variable for the study is online shopping behavior adaptation and culture as the moderate variable. This research has used a mono method with a quantitative approach and data collection has been done by using a simple random sampling method. As per the Morgan table requirements of 384 sample size,384 questioners have been distributed and 355 fully completed sheets have been received with a 92% response rate. Reliability analysis has been tested with Cronbach’s Alpha method. Further Pearson correlation coefficient has been used to check the reliability analysis, in order to check the relationship among the pairs of variables. Multiple linear regression analysis has been used to check the direct relationship among the dependent and the independent variables. The moderation impact of the culture also has been checked with the SPSS software aid. With the results of the analysis researcher has found that Service Quality, Social Influence, Effort Expectancy, Performance Expectancy, and Facilitating Conditions are impacting online shopping behavior in Sri Lanka and further study has identified that effort expectancy, social influence, and the service quality has a moderate impact of the culture by achieving the main objective of the research study.