Irish consumer attitudes towards e-commerce and the effectiveness of online advertising amongst 18-26 year old's

Acknowledgement

I would take this opportunity to thank my research supervisor, family and friends for their support and guidance without which this research would not have been possible.

Table of Contents

Introduction2

Theoretical background and hypotheses5

Extension of the TAM5

Research Question6

Background Research6

Research Objectives7

Literature Review9

Beliefs and attitudes toward online advertising11

Consumer behavioral responses14

Culture, beliefs and attitudes toward online advertising16

The moderating effect of e -purchasing experience17

Data analysis21

The influence of Irish culture21

Methodology23

Results23

Demography of Data23

Correlation28

Regression29

Hours Spent on Internet and Purchase30

Hours Spent on Internet and Advertising31

Purchase and Advertising32

ANOVA33

Hypotheses Testing33

Discussion36

Conclusion50

References56

Irish consumer attitudes towards e-commerce and the effectiveness of online advertising amongst 18-26 year old's

Introduction

The analysis of consumer behavior is a key aspect for the success of an e -business. However, the behavior of consumers in the Internet market changes as they acquire e -purchasing experience ([Gefen et al., 2003] and [Yu et al., 2005]). The perceptions which induce them to make an initial e -purchase may have different effects on their subsequent decisions or repurchasing behavior because the use of the information technology (IT) may modify certain perceptions and attitudes ([Thompson et al., 1994], [Taylor and Todd, 1995] and [Gefen et al., 2003]). Despite these differences, very little research carried out in the e-commerce field has conducted a separate analysis of the perceptions related to the adoption and to the “post-adoption” decisions ([Karahanna et al., 1999] and [Vijayasarathy, 2004]).

Moreover, hardly any researchers have analyzed the behavior of e -customers as they gain experience (as [Taylor and Todd, 1995] and [Vijayasarathy, 2004] state). Most studies have considered that the low level of development of this new channel meant that the differences between the two decisions were not yet significant, and their principal objective was, therefore, to determine the perceptions which led consumers to adopt the Internet as an alternative shopping channel to the offline market ([Chen et al., 2002] and [Verhagen et al., 2006]). Nevertheless, the growth of e-commerce has made it clear that customer behavior has evolved. As in other types of purchase situations ([Sheth, 1968] and [Heilman et al., 2000]), customer behavior does not necessarily remain stable over time since the experience acquired from past purchases means that perceptions change ([Taylor and Todd, 1995] and [Yu et al., 2005]).

When customers repeat their behavior several times, they feel more and more in control and form favorable intentions about purchasing (Liao et al., 2006). Likewise, e -purchases allow the customers to become more familiar with the Internet as a shopping channel, to value some aspects of the shopping process more highly and to ignore certain characteristics that may have been important in the early stages.

The principal objective of this paper is to analyze the perceptions which lead customers to purchase over the Internet, testing the moderating effect of e -purchasing experience. We distinguish between two types of behavior: the adoption of e-commerce (initial behavior or first purchase) and repurchase or subsequent behavior. We carried out this analysis in Ireland and distinguished two groups in the sample; (1) potential ...