Online grocery shopping Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Online grocery shopping - Essay Example With the age of growing technology and internet popularity, marketing has become easier because customers have an opportunity to post reviews about products and have others access it before making decisions. Companies can use the reviews to improve their products and develop others that match customer’s needs. As a marketing manager of Miou Company Ltd, I will examine literature review to understand traits of internet shoppers, their general shopping orientation, their web-usage-related lifestyle, and their psychographic characteristics. In addition, I will evaluate their motivations for shopping groceries online, their perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of shopping online for groceries and situational factors that may elicit online purchase of groceries. Miou Company that has a chain of national supermarkets in Australia intends to open an online grocery-shopping website to counter the challenge posed by fast growing online shopping. One of the first things to co nsider in the research is seeking to understand the traits of internet shoppers. Internet shoppers tend to rely on feedback reviews about products and services done by those who have already been served by the company. According to Zhu and Zhang, a recent survey reveals that 24% of internet users’ access online reviews before paying for a service delivered offline. Such reviews have become an important marketing tool because companies post information about their products, engineer online forums and chats about the products where they proactively advice their consumers to spread the gospel of their products. Through use of internet, companies have managed to manipulate customer’s reviews and influence their decisions (Zhu and Zhang, 2010). Chevalier and Mayzlin agree to the character of online customers that depend on reviews. They argue that customer ratings significantly influence product sales especially in the book industry where customers read review texts in addi tion to review statistics (Chevalier & Mayzlin, 2006) Secondly, a market researcher must seek to understand customer’s general shopping orientation. The advancement of World Wide Web has enabled many companies to transact online and customers to do web shopping. Electronic shopping is growing by day and thus has become an important trend that influences the markets. Therefore, to identify the opportunity a researcher needs to identify the determinants of a customer’s online purchase intention. Since managers need to make a decision, the opportunity becomes the problem. A small sample will help in understanding the impacts of shopping orientations. According to Ling, a research run to determine shopping orientations, online trust, and prior online purchase experience to the customer purchase intention reveals that impulse purchase intention brand orientation, quality orientation, and prior online experience have a positive impact to the customer online purchase intentio n (Ling, 2010). Online shopping experience is different from the traditional consumer behaviour, which calls for marketers to explore the determinants of customer online intention among web shoppers. Forsythe and Shi concurs with this argument and states that online shopping poses special risks on the side of the customer, which makes trust an important aspect for a transaction to take place (Forsythe, Shi,