Global Journal of Commerce & Management Perspective
Open Access

Effects of Online Shopping on Experience Goods Other than Grocery

Isabelle Feldhaus^{* *}Correspondence: Isabelle Feldhaus, Department of Economics and Statistics, Sorbonne University, Paris, France, Email:

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Description

Researchers and transport planners were encouraged by the surge in e-commerce adoption and drop in in-store purchasing during the height of the COVID-19 outbreak, as it seemed that ecommerce could potentially reduce the number of shopping visits. At the same time, shifts in consumer attitudes and purchasing patterns across the COVID-19 timeline complicate matters and call for further research into how changing consumer behavior affects travel. This study investigates the relationship between the frequency of in-person and online buying as well as the mediating role of consumers' views in early 2021. In order to investigate how different socioeconomic, demographic, and household characteristics, as well as attitudes, affected the shopping behavior of over 2,000 Floridians, four categories of non-grocery experience goods were surveyed: Home, Garden, and Tools (HGT); Toys, Kids, And Baby supplies (TKB); Clothing, Shoes, Watches, and Jewellery (CSWJ); and Beauty and Health products (BH).

After developing structural equation models to examine their purchasing habits for each product, the findings demonstrated that there were reciprocal complementarity effects between the online and in-store purchase rates for TKB and CSWJ. Online shopping increased the frequency of in-store purchases for the other product categories, but no opposite effects were seen.

The findings also demonstrated that a variety of personal and family characteristics had significant mediation effects and that individual attitudes had a considerable impact in people's buying decisions. The love of shopping (i.e., leisure shopping) and worries about privacy and security tended to enhance the frequency of in-store buying, but tech savvy, preferences for alternative modes, and the benefits of online shopping had a direct positive influence on the frequency of online shopping. The frequency of online purchasing was negatively impacted by unattended delivery concerns, but the frequency of in-store buying was negatively impacted by preferences for the advantages of online shopping. The traffic consequences of the anticipated increase in delivery demand and passenger travel are examined in light of these findings. Before the corona virus pandemic struck in early 2020, the share of retail sales attributed to e-commerce had been steadily rising annually over the previous 20 years. Sales in physical stores declined while e-commerce sales increased dramatically as the disease's uncertainty grew in the first half of 2020 and non-essential businesses were temporarily closed to stop the virus's spread. For instance, adjusted overall retail sales decreased by almost 4% between the first and second quarters of 2020, but e-commerce sales increased by more than 30% during the same time.

These incidents had a particularly negative effect on non-food items like apparel and accessories, whose total retail sales (unadjusted) fell by 85% from $19.2 billion in February 2020 to $2.8 billion in April 2020 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022). But once vaccination campaigns got underway in December 2020 and the lockdown restrictions started to ease in the first quarter of 2021, consumers felt more at ease gradually resuming their previous shopping routines.

These occurrences imply that many consumers may not have developed new purchasing patterns as a result of the epidemic or that, following a protracted time of social distance restrictions, there may be some rebound buying trips to stores. Given the substantial effects that online shopping has on freight logistics operations and travel demand modelling (e.g., the location of warehouses, parking concerns, and the replacement of passenger cars with trucks), a careful analysis is warranted when determining whether the pandemic has caused or may cause a persistent shift from in-store to online shopping. When it comes to non-grocery experiential products, the complementarity effects indicate that transport planners shouldn't anticipate a major decrease in shopping travel as a result of e-commerce. But since this study only looked at experience goods, further research is still needed to look at other product categories, like search products. Future research should take into account how different product kinds' shopping behaviors are influenced by spatial features and store accessibility.