Perceived advantages and disadvantages of Internet Shopping

Abstract

In comparison with the traditional way of trading, the Internet business companies have greater growth potential. This is true for as long as they are able to recognize and expand efficient marketing activities within the ever changing boundaries of ecommerce. For Internet shops this implies the ability to design an attractive purchase conditions and propositions. It is for this reason that this paper researches the advantages and disadvantages of Internet shopping as perceived by customers. The main objectives are to find out the strength of the perceived advantages and disadvantages and to consequently define some recommendations for Internet shops. At the same time, the research sought to identify significant clusters of customers according to their identically perceived advantages of Internet shopping. Significant clusters are then described. For this purpose, an extensive survey was conducted in the form of an electronic survey. In addition to methods of statistical description, cluster analysis, including classification trees, was used to search for and identify significant segmentation criteria. The most strongly perceived advantages and disadvantages are identified, recommendations for value co-creation are formulated and new potential segmentation criterion is created. The results of this research should be helpful to Internet business companies to keep and strengthen their market position compared to conventional shops.

Keywords

• Internet shopping
• e-commerce
• value-creation
• segmentation
• perceived advantages