Online retail in Australia 2007-2013

This study of online retail in Australia from 2007-13, part of the World Internet Project (WIP) reveals a consistent pattern of large increases in the number of online purchases made by Australian consumers, reaching an average expenditure of 2616 a year in 2013. Online shopping in Australia is enjoying a strong second wave of growth as more consumers build internet browsing, purchasing and financial transactions into their everyday lives.  After an apparent plateau between 2009 and 2011, this latest survey confirms that online shopping by Australian consumers grew strongly again between 2011 and 2013.  The mean value of monthly online purchases by Australians grew by 5.8% to 218 from 2011-13, while the actual number of internet purchases grew by 46.2%. Men are still the internet shopping kings, buying $229 in online goods a month, compared to women’s purchases of$204. The good news for Australian businesses is that local retailers are maintaining their share of this growth, as Australian consumers maintain their strong preference for shopping with domestically-based websites.  Three out of ten Australians now shop online every week, or more often, compared with two in ten New Zealanders and one in ten Swiss. There has also been a continued major upsurge in the number of Australians using the internet for financial transactions. For example people making travel bookings online grew from 49% in 2007 to 73% in 2013, those paying bills grew from 43% to 72% and those purchasing event tickets from 36% to 65%. The latest survey also reveals renewed growth in Australians buying digital content – movies, books, music, games etc – online rather than in-store. The WIP is conducted in 30 countries round the world to compare internet use and behaviour. In Australia it consists of an annual survey of 1000 people aged 18 or older and has been running since 2007. The WIP is part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. • Dr Scott Ewing is a Senior Research Fellow at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research and at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation. &nbsp

Visual decisions in the analysis of customers online shopping behavior

The analysis of the online customer shopping behavior is an important task nowadays, which allows maximizing the efficiency of advertising campaigns and increasing the return of investment for advertisers. The analysis results of online customer shopping behavior are usually reviewed and understood by a non-technical person; therefore the results must be displayed in the easiest possible way. The online shopping data is multidimensional and consists of both numerical and categorical data. In this paper, an approach has been proposed for the visual analysis of the online shopping data and their relevance. It integrates several multidimensional data visualization methods of different nature. The results of the visual analysis of numerical data are combined with the categorical data values. Based on the visualization results, the decisions on the advertising campaign could be taken in order to increase the return of investment and attract more customers to buy in the online e-shop

Ideal Types of Online Shoppers – A Qualitative Analysis of Online Shopping Behavior

Due to the growing popularity of online shopping, there is a growing demand for understanding the motives and behaviour of online shoppers. This study aims to increase this understanding by examining online shopping behaviour from the perspective of UTAUT2 theory integrated with self-efficacy and risk avoidance components. The thematically analysed data from 31 participants highlights the unique aspects of online shoppers by grouping them into ideal types, presenting the data as extensively as possible. An ideal type is an analytical construct used to ascertain similarities and deviations to concrete cases in an individual phenomenon. This study discovered five ideal types of online shoppers: Conservative Shoppers, Rational Shoppers, Hedonistic Shoppers, Spontaneous Shoppers and Van-guard Shoppers. The main theoretical contribution of this study are the formed ideal shopper types enriched with practical implications for online shop providers on how to best meet the needs of each ideal type. The purpose of the ideal types is not to categorize online shoppers under one category but rather help to understand regularities of different types of online shopping behaviour. This under-standing is beneficial for online shop providers as well as for academics interested in studying online shopping behaviour from the information systems point of view

Memory-based preferential choice in large option spaces

Whether adding songs to a playlist or groceries to a shopping basket, everyday decisions often require us to choose between an innumerable set of options. Laboratory studies of preferential choice have made considerable progress in describing how people navigate fixed sets of options. Yet, questions remain about how well this generalises to more complex, everyday choices. In this thesis, I ask how people navigate large option spaces, focusing particularly on how long-term memory supports decisions. In the first project, I explore how large option spaces are structured in the mind. A topic model trained on the purchasing patterns of consumers uncovered an intuitive set of themes that centred primarily around goals (e.g., tomatoes go well in a salad), suggesting that representations are geared to support action. In the second project, I explore how such representations are queried during memory-based decisions, where options must be retrieved from memory. Using a large dataset of over 100,000 online grocery shops, results revealed that consumers query multiple systems of associative memory when determining what choose next. Attending to certain knowledge sources, as estimated by a cognitive model, predicted important retrieval errors, such as the propensity to forget or add unwanted products. In the final project, I ask how preferences could be learned and represented in large option spaces, where most options are untried. A cognitive model of sequential decision making is proposed, which learns preferences over choice attributes, allowing for the generalisation of preferences to unseen options, by virtue of their similarity to previous choices. This model explains reduced exploration patterns behaviour observed in the supermarket and preferential choices in more controlled laboratory settings. Overall, this suggests that consumers depend on associative systems in long-term memory when navigating large spaces of options, enabling inferences about the conceptual properties and subjective value of novel options

Consumer behaviour in online shopping - understanding the role of regulatory focus.

The behaviour of consumers on the Internet is increasingly a focus of marketing research. In particular, consumers behaviour in online shopping, from adoption motivation to post-usage behaviour, has become a major focus of research in the field of marketing, especially within consumer behaviour. Yet it has been acknowledged that while aspects such as adoption and usage motivation are now better understood, there are many questions that remain unanswered, and this warrants continued research effort. In line with the above, this research addresses an issue in online consumer behaviour that is currently under researched and which relates to the role that the consumers regulatory focus trait plays in their manifested behaviour in online shopping. The research argues that it is important to understand the role of regulatory focus in online shopping because this psychological trait has been shown to affect other aspects of human behaviour such as in response to advertising, dieting and sports. Drawing upon research from consumer behaviour and the wider fields of marketing and psychology, this research proposes a number of hypotheses relating the consumers regulatory focus to her perception of online shopping, motivation for online shopping, and actual usage behaviour in a structural manner. The resulting structural equation model is then tested using empirical data obtained from 306 Internet shoppers in the United Kingdom. The results of the research confirm that regulatory focus has an influence on consumer behaviour in online shopping by affecting their perception, motivation and usage of online shopping. The research makes a unique contribution by demonstrating that regulatory focus is a valid and robust predictor of online shopping behaviour and behavioural outcomes, a conclusion which is relevant to both marketing research and marketing practice. Finally, the research identifies and recommends areas for future studies