Consumer Decision –Making Style and the Online Shopping

Convenience:An Empirical Study in Saudi

Retailing Sector

 د. محمد بن عبدالرحمن المطيري أ. سعاد

بنت عبدالله المشعلكلية إدارة /جامعة الملك سعود

قسم التسويق/األعمال

Introduction

The retailing sector has grown rapidly and its purchasing power is increasing in the recent years (Sharma & Levy, 1995).

As retailing is the final destination in the distribution process, it is one of the most sensitive sectors. There is a need to work hard and understand the consumers` decision-making styles to meet their growing demands (Montoya-Weiss et al., 2003).

Nevertheless the major retailers function besides selling is to know how consumers behave and determine their decision making style (Jun et al., 2004).

Accordingly, the difference in customer decision-making style and the shift to internet channel put more duties on retailers to achieve the consumers’ convenience in online shopping.

Problem Statement This study aims to investigate the relationship between the independent variable customer decision-making style and the dependent variable online shopping convenience among Saudi retailing sectors

This paper will contribute by; First: investigating the dominant famous customer decision making style in Saudi context.

Second, it will help to clarify the relationship between each decision style category and online shopping convenience.

Third, empirical evidence will enrich the literature.

Importance of the Study

Research Questions What is the type of the relationship between customer decision-making style and online shopping convenience? What is the most common decision-making style? Does internet shopping affect shopping convenience?  

Research Objectives The main objectives of this paper are:* To understand the customer decision-making style.* To determine the relationship between customer decision- making style and online shopping convenience? * To explain the effect of internet shopping on shopping convenience

Literature Review

1.Consumer Decision-Making - Consumer decision-making styles - Brand-conscious - Perfectionist conscious - Novelty and fashion-conscious - Price-conscious 2. Online Shopping - Online Shopping Convenience

3. Saudi Retailing Industry

 H1. There is appositive and significant relationship between brand-conscious and online shopping convenience. H2. There is appositive and significant relationship between perfectionist-conscious and online shopping convenience. H3. There is appositive and significant relationship between novelty and fashion-conscious and online shopping convenience. H4. There is appositive and significant relationship between price-conscious and online shopping convenience.

Research Model Research Hypotheses  

Research Methodology* The data for this study was collected via self-administered survey to probability sample.* The unit of analysis for this study is decision-making consumers who are buying online from both genders at different positions, educational levels and different ages.

Instrument Design The questionnaire for this study consists of two scales:

* The first scale is a four items scale that was developed to measure shopping convenience and was developed based on Hawes and Lumpkin (1984) and Gehrt and Shim (1998). * The second scale is the decision making style Scale that was developed by Sproles and Kendall (1986). This scale contains four sub-scales with 21 items. Analysis Technique The collected data was analyzed by using SPSS software; percentages and frequency were calculated to interpret the demographic characteristic of the sample.Regression analysis was adopted to identify the relationships between study variables. Coefficient alpha was applied to find the reliability.

Study Results

* Out of 400 distributed questionnaires 360 were returned surveys, thus the response rate is 90%. * The average alpha coefficient for the questionnaire was 0.722. * The following table shows the statistical results:

Hypothes

es

Relationship

s

P-value β F Results

H1 Brand-

conscious

0.001 0.225 10.458 Supported

H2 Perfectionist-

conscious

0.000 0.000 23.282 Supported

H3 Novelty-

conscious

0.000 0.000 14.686 Supported

H4 Price-

conscious

0.002 0.002 9.952 Supported

Findings and Interpretation

•The analysis shows that consumers are positively related to shopping convenience which confirms the previous results provided by (Cowart et al., 2008; Siu et al., 2001).

• There is a positive and significant relationship between the study variables namely; brand conscious, perfectionist conscious, novelty conscious and price conscious.

• The study results show that consumers who are perfectionist conscious are more convenience when shopping online (Ravindran et al., 2009).

• The study proved that the perfectionist and the novelty-conscious consumers are more convenience in shopping than the brand and price-conscious; our findings confirms the results found in previous studies (Guido et al.,2007; Jiang et al., 2013).

• This indicates that consumers tend to use online shopping to search for the high quality and novelty more than physical stores.

Conclusion and Recommendations

•This study found that the differences in shopping styles between the four study variables expand to the literature.

• The study found some similarities between Saudi and other shoppers, for example, North America and Portugal shoppers (Beauchamp & Ponder, 2010; Jiang et al., 2013).

• Marketers need to understand the consumer decision-making styles that common in Saudi context in order to meet their expectations and increase the level of convenience.

• Marketers need to classify their products to fit with the consumer styles and online shopping.

• In terms of marketing research, the online shopping area enables researchers to develop international, cross cultural studies and contexts comparisons aiming to fill global gaps.

• Regarding the marketing implementation, this may enhance the development of product positioning strategies addressing the differences in consumers’ decisions- making styles.

Limitation and Future Studies

* This study has some limitationFirst, the study investigated the decision-making styles in Saudi context in general there is no specific products have been tested.

Second, the sample used in this study has diversity characteristics which may affect the study results.

Third, this study examined the common four decision- making styles only where there are more styles could be studied.

* For future studies:- It is best to examine personal characteristics, replication in other context is needed for generalization.

- Furthermore, the online shopping convenience may be studied in comparison with the traditional shopping stores convenience.

Thank you for you attention