Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Marketing

Department

Business

First Advisor

Okey Peter Onyia

Second Advisor

Karolina Schneidger

Third Advisor

David Rosenwasser

Abstract

Generally speaking, the Internet is directly influencing the buying decision-making process of the consumer. More than ask relatives and friends' opinions, current customers tend now to acquire information about products on search engines, social networks, blogs, or websites. Therefore, this research was set to develop a better overall understanding about online buying behavior.

The e-commerce is growing every year and the number of consumers willing to spend money on virtual transactions follows this tendency. In order to better understand this trend, the market for academic books was chosen as a reference to appreciate how consumers behave when buying a specific product online and to assess which factor they might take into consideration when shopping online.

The literature review has shown that the Internet has specific characteristics that can be considered determinant for attracting consumers to shop online. Despite the fact that there are a vast number of variables that somehow affects the way in which consumers behave when shopping online, this research identified four major variables: consumer personality, product characteristics, previous online shopping experiences, and trust in online shopping. Moreover, this research had also the objective of understanding which factors might influence the consumer's decision of repeating the purchase. The goal was to investigate what are the attributes expected by consumers when shopping for academic books online that will lead them to define their online experience as satisfactory. The variables that mediate this decision are delivery time, price, return policy, and quality of the product.

This study indicated that college students are spending great part of their day connected to the Internet, accessing the Internet continuously throughout the day. This research also indicated that more than half of the college students who participated in this study do buy their academic books online. Even though the literature review has shown that the variables being used in this study do affect consumer's decision of buying or not buying online, the model created based on these variables has no statistical significance, which means that this study failed to reject the null hypothesis.

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