Buying Food Online: what explains the consumer purchase behaviour?

Abstract

The motivations of the consumer when he or she is buying food online remain unknown. This is one of the first research to review the general motivations that the consumer presents when making the decision to purchase food using electronic commerce as a purchase channel. A virtual food shopping experiment was conducted for 30 weeks and 223 responses were obtained from shoppers with different demographic characteristics. Motivations were modelled using Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) framework and solved by structural equations (SEM) in total, it was possible to obtain significant responses for 14 effects. Results indicate that convenience associated with ease of use and hedonic motivations are the motivations with the greatest influence on the consumers’ purchasing response. It was possible to determine, among other things, that variables such as socioeconomic status do not strongly influence the response in the virtual purchase of food.