E-shopping Across EU – Why Some Individuals Refuse to Adopt It?
Abstract
Despite many advantages of e-commerce for both firms and buyers, it is still not equally adopted by customers in all European Union countries. According to Digital Scoreboard in countries such as United Kingdom and Denmark, nearly 90% of Internet users shop online. On the other hand, in Romania and Bulgaria, not even one-third of the Internet users buy goods and services online. Diffusion of e-shopping clearly has different pace across EU. In this article, we focus on individuals who refuse to purchase over Internet and aim to explore reasons for their behavior. To do so, we rely on Community Statistics on Information Society (CSIS) microdata for the year 2015. Individuals who report ordering and buying over the Internet more than one year ago and those who never engaged in online shopping were asked about reasons for not buying online. Potential reasons include lack of skills, privacy and security concerns, delivery concerns and problems, not having payment cards as well as habit, loyalty and preference of shopping in stores. The focus of this article is on comparison of reasons for not shopping online of individuals in EU countries that lead in adoption of e-shopping with laggard countries. We first analyze the prevalence of reasons for not buying online and compare countries in that respect. Among individuals who did not adopt e-shopping, there are those who have tried it at one point in time and did not continue to use it frequently and those who actually never engaged in buying over Internet. Both have certain reasons and constrains that prevent them from adopting this form of shopping. The analysis is followed by identification of reasons that significantly affect probability of trying online shopping, if not adopting it fully. It can be assumed that gaining true experience might contribute to increase in adoption of e-shopping among individuals. This is even more important for countries that still lag behind not just in buying online but in overall digital performance.
Keywords: e-shopping, adoption, customers, European Union
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