ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF ONLINE RETAILING ON MALL SHOPPERS AND INTERNET USERS

Online retailing, often referred to as online shopping or e-tailing, is growing every day in India. Although most studies in the past have pointed out that the process has been rather slow and unsuccessful in gathering much steam with the Indian users, the trend is changing now and a good number of savvy online users are making big purchases on the digital space. The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of online shopping on both mall shoppers and internet users and how they are receptive to this change. It will also focus on some of the factors responsible for influencing the consumers to purchase through online mode and internet shopping attitudes. It also tries to study the situational and product category effects on intention to use internet versus mall shopping. This study can be considered as descriptive in nature and a questionnaire is designed and distributed among the selected sample to collect information and their opinions regarding online shopping. The results indicate that internet shopping has a relatively near term competitive impact on traditional shopping for the cognitive product market, while the effect of internet on sensory experiential market may not be as pronounced. Attitude towards internet shopping, past experience with online shopping and demographic characteristics influenced information search intention and shopping through internet.