Conclusions

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This chapter has revealed various business models adopted by the U.K. major supermarkets and a mixed view of consumers toward Internet shopping for groceries. A significant number of people will stick to conventional supermarkets for grocery shopping because of the nature of social contacts and the need to touch and feel products. However, there are a great number of consumers who see Internet shopping as beneficial, and their attitude will change toward Internet shopping, although current purchasing from the Internet is surprisingly low. The main driving force of shopping for groceries online is convenience and time saving, but consumers are sensitive on product price, delivery charge and Internet access costs, which could become great obstacles for luring more customers to Internet shopping. The deepest concern on Internet shopping is security. Consumers were wary of giving out their credit card details and lack confidence in the supermarkets' ability to keep their personal details confidential. Difficulty in judging quality and freshness of products and losing social contacts and experiences are also affecting factors preventing people from switching to Internet shopping.

Internet shopping seems well established and available to a large and growing section of the population, but the supermarkets have only scratched the surface. The implementation of this study is that supermarkets' e-commerce strategy needs to be reshaped in light of better understanding of customers' attitudes and perceptions in both traditional and Internet shopping. It can be suggested that the current e-commerce strategy adopted by the supermarkets could retain a small group of consumers who seek convenience and time saving from Internet shopping and home delivery. In order to gain more Internet shoppers, in a short or intermediate term, supermarkets should focus on increasing product variety and improving visualisation of multiple quality dimensions, and providing better offers through reducing product price and removing delivery charges. There are a large number of potential Internet shoppers who are price sensitive and their expectation is that Internet shopping should offer a better deal. Internet shopping could allow lower prices owning to lower costs for merchants, lower cost per customer contact, and lower maintenance costs. In particular, choosing which picking up model for the virtual store should consider not only for the efficiency of operations, but value added to the customers. In the long range, the success will depend on the development of advanced Internet security protocols—for example, secured transaction and payment processing, consumer confidence, as well as an improved e-commerce legal environment and IT infrastructure for easy Internet shopping, e.g., legislation on privacy protection, repudiation, and free Internet access.

The results generated from this survey need to be interpreted with caution, mainly due to limited access to the merchants' data and the limited sample selected in the south of England. Particularly, only 7.5 percent of respondents actually made purchases from the supermarkets' Internet sites, this makes rigorously examining the relationship between consumer shopping behaviour/perception and supermarket Internet shopping model/strategy impossible. Further studies can be conducted in this direction based on experienced Internet shoppers. Despite the limitation, this study is one of the first focusing on consumer perceptions on both traditional and Internet shopping in supermarkets sector in the U.K. Most of the results confirm the findings reported from U.S.-based studies, which suggest that consumers in general hold similar views toward Internet shopping regardless of industry and individual characteristic's differences.



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Advanced Topics in End User Computing (Vol. 3)
Advanced Topics in End User Computing, Vol. 3
ISBN: 1591402573
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 191

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