Migration of consumers to Internet shopping in Sao Paulo: an exploratory study/A adesao do consumidor paulistano as compras pela Internet: um estudo exploratorio/La adhesion del consumidor de Sao Paulo a las compras por la Internet: un estudio exploratorio.
| Autor | de Siqueira, Joao Paulo Lara |
| Cargo | ARTIGO--MARKETING |
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INTRODUCTION
As soon as the Internet became available to society, people and companies became interested in using it to obtain the most varied benefits. In business, the use of the Internet for carrying out commercial transactions was one of the first forms of use, which became known as electronic commerce or e-commerce for short. From this initial moment, there have been alternating periods of great optimism and a certain disillusionment. Nevertheless, the volume of sales over the Internet, in general, has always grown. For Zilber (2002:76), "companies are increasingly using the infrastructure of the Internet and the application of e-commerce as a way of handling their business processes, with those relating to customer service clearly predominating." According to a survey carried out by Forrester Research (2004) with decision-makers from 182 American companies, over the next five years it is expected that there will be an increase of between 21% and 32% in the contribution to the results of these companies from the revenue of Internet operations.
In Brazil, according to the Management Committee of the Internet in Brazil (CGIB, 2005), there are some 800,000 registered "dot.com" domains, each one theoretically corresponding to a company that has a commercial purpose. This number shows just how big the e-commerce phenomenon is. The size and growth of this market in Brazil can also be assessed by data coming from E-bit, a company that carries out online market research. Graph 1 shows that the growth in sales through Brazilian websites has been significant. This growth derives from various factors and one of them is possibly that company initiatives are coming into line with the interests and preferences of its customers.
It is worth observing that over the last few decades the routines of people who live in major cities have changed considerably. Getting from one place to another has become increasingly difficult, people are working more, risks are higher and the rare moments of leisure have become precious. Consequently, service via the Internet might be seen as an opportunity for companies to make life more convenient for their customers, by adding value to their products and services; this is a move that will make sense if consumers are prepared to pay for this convenience. However, it might be questioned whether consumers, in general, have this vision of e-commerce or if it is only shared by a small group of people. In the latter hypothesis, the potential of the market might be close to its limit and the rest of the population will continue to make their purchases in the traditional retail sector.
This work intends to check whether consumers who live in large cities have some type of predisposition in favor of or against e-commerce. Taking purchases via the Internet as an alternative to traditional retail stores, the secondary objective of this study is to expand knowledge about consumer attitudes, preferences and degree of satisfaction with physical stores. The study is justified, since selling via the Internet is not a consolidated issue. The pertinent theory is still being constructed while people's propensity to using this purchase channel is apparently evolving.
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E-COMMERCE AND CONSUMER BEHAVIOR
Turban et al. (2000) date origins of e-commerce back to the 1970s, with the growth of the electronic transfer of funds and electronic data exchange. other applications, ranging from share trading to travel reservation systems, followed these early ones. Although the heavily telecom-based strategic value of these systems was widely recognized, only when the Internet's commercial phase started in the early 1990s was the term "electronic commerce" coined and its applications expanded. For Turban and King (2004:3), e-commerce "is understood as being the process whereby products, services and information are bought, sold and exchanged over computer information networks or via the Internet." According to Kambil (1997), e-commerce is the application of information technology for sustaining business processes and for the exchange of goods and services, while Malaga (2001) considers that the capacity of information technologies such as the worldwide web to facilitate economic activity is called e-commerce.
Currently, the understanding of the term e commerce is fairly wide-ranging and it has broad implicit possibilities for entities involved, the products traded, the information processed and the computer networks used. These include online payments, the placing of orders, buying, selling, reservations, etc. However, there are restrictions; for example, whereas there are widespread electronic sales of music CDs, the sale of clothes, which generally need to be tried on, is far more limited.
The way in which people decide on their purchases can be analyzed from the microeconomics and marketing points of view. In the microeconomic approach, the consumer is analyzed and mathematically modeled, the assumption being that his behavior is rational and that he is trying to maximize utility. on the other hand, in marketing, the study of consumer behavior often focuses on the purchasing process and on the variety of forces that model it (CHURCHILL JR.; PETER, 2003). Mowen and Minor (2002:3) define consumer behavior as "the study of the buying units and exchange processes involved in the acquisition, consumption and disposition of goods, services, experiences or ideas." In this wider approach, marketing resorts to sociology, psychology and other sciences to understand consumer behavior.
The consumer is definitely a complex being because of his multiple facets. For Giglio (2004:47), the study of consumer behavior must take into account that:
* Humans are positive; their behavior is dictated by rational processes of comparison, analysis and synthesis;
* Humans are emotional, moved by conscious and unconscious feelings;
* Humans are social, moved and controlled by the group's rules;
* Humans are dialectic, moved by the opposition there is in human existence (altruism and egoism, for example);
* Humans are complex, moved by decision and indecision on various levels, which makes their behavior unpredictable.
Churchill Jr. and Peter (2003) indicate that the study of consumer behavior should consider that when a consumer makes a purchase, he might be meeting a utilitarian or hedonic need. Utilitarian need concerns basic functions and material benefits, whereas hedonic need concerns the desire for pleasure and self-expression. Finally, Kotler (1995:60) indicates that "marketing professionals should study the desires, perceptions, preferences and buying behavior of their consumers." Such a study will provide the clues needed for developing new products, new product features, price, channels, messages and other elements of the marketing mix.
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DEVELOPMENT OF THE RESEARCH
The research had the following specific objectives:
To check the distribution of people in an urban center who express restrictions as to e commerce;
To investigate the benefits and restrictions that people in favor of and against e-commerce attribute to it;
To outline the factors that contribute to people being in favor of or against making their purchases via e-commerce.
Bearing in mind that the objectives of this work involved consumer behavior, the researchers decided to carry out a study that had an empirical-analytical approach and involved collecting information in the field. According to Adams and Preiss after Moreira (2002:15), this type of study "has to do with the types of activities carried out by the researcher when dealing with people who are the object of his study." According to the same authors, this type of investigation may be used to measure attitudes, preferences, beliefs and behavior, mapping out forecasts about the future, or even asking questions about facts in the lives of people.
The universe for which the investigation was designed comprises adult consumers living in the city of Sao Paulo. Information was collected from a sample of individuals, using questionnaire-based interviews. Since the most important questions on the questionnaire were closed and dichotomous and because the dispersion of the population was unknown, a priori, when deciding on the sample size the worst case scenario was considered, which is 50% positive replies and 50% negative. By adopting a correctness level of 95.5% for establishing confidence intervals and a maximum error rate of 5%, the researchers decided that a minimum sample size of 400 people was needed. Since the sample size is very much smaller than the population, it was unnecessary to use the correction factor for finite populations.
The questionnaire was first submitted to a pretest of 20 interviews, which helped to refine it until it reached the final version used in the field survey. The interviews were carried out in the street, in predetermined locations, with people chosen by the interviewer, whose quota of interviews involved stratification criteria by region of the city, gender and places frequented by consumers who fell into the high, medium and low income bands. The sizing of the quotas of the interviewers took into account IBGE census data, which indicate approximately equal percentages between men and women in the population. Table 1, below, shows the characteristics of the sample.
The procedures adopted regarding the size and composition of the sample were aimed at obtaining sampling results that would indicate with a relative degree of certainty the trends and behavior of all consumers from Sao Paulo, in accordance with the variables and dimensions investigated in the survey. Sampling by quotas is not strictly probabilistic--a prerequisite for making inferences--although similar opinion-gathering studies using samples of this...
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