Buyers behavioural change with reference to online buying under current situational crisis: an empirical study

Online buying platform in India is moderately to highly developed, especially in urban and semi-urban areas. It has been estimated, out of total retail sales in 2019; almost 5% is through online mode and it has also been estimated that retail e-commerce sales will touch 45 billion dollars figure in 2021 from 16 billion dollars in 2016, in India (Statista Research Department Publication, 17.12.2015). The report has also pointed out that size of India’s e-commerce industry will touch 188 billion dollars in 2025 from more than 50 billion dollars in 2017. These figures have easily pointed out the magnitude of acceptance of online buying mechanisms by the retail customers of the country. Though the penetration of e-commerce or online buying in India is low in comparison to other countries of Asia Pacific. It is mainly restricted to urban areas and semi-urban areas and among younger generation of the nation, unlike other countries of Europe, America and also to some extant South-East Asian countries. But undoubtedly it is a rising industrial sector of the country. The current global pandemic and resultant lockdown has some good impacts on this sector. On one side due to restrictions on free movement due to safety issues many e-commerce companies shut down or limited their service reach in various places and people are also started to avoid online buying due to safety and economic issues. Again, as physical movement of customers are not necessary in case of online buying and ensuring social distancing is need of the time, many people are going for online mediums to buy things. Based on the above facts it is clear that in the current scenario it is very much necessary to understand how much online buying habits of customers changes in context to current situational crisis. The researchers classified retail products that consumers are buying into three broad categories. The data has been collected through sample survey and Related-Samples Sign Test is being run by the researchers to identify the change in preferences. Apart from this descriptive statistics in respect to collected data has been provided. The results show completely mixed results for different categories of products and according to it the researchers provided the recommendations. Finally, the future research ideas in this area have been discussed in brief apart from mentioning research limitations.