“What do customers prefer?-A Study on online shopping with respect to Apparel”

Online shopping is no doubt the current trend. Online shopping on sectors such as fashion and accessories, electronic/electrical goods and books are growing in Bangalore. Many researches claimed that online shopping is still at the early stage of development in Bangalore and the potential for growth is inevitable. However, little is known about the acceptance of online shopping on localized Apparels such factors which influence consumer preference towards online marketing with reference to Apparels. The purpose of this study is to identify the potential of online shopping by investigating consumers’ preference towards purchasing Apparels through online shopping as an alternative to visiting the physical shop. It also investigated the influence of factors (demographic profile, previous online shopping experience, perceived benefits, consumers’ lifestyles, and perceived merchants’ trustworthiness) towards attitude. The results and findings show that consumers exhibited positive intention to make an online purchase in future and preferences positively and strongly correlated with behavioural intention. The study also concluded the perceived benefits of online shopping, perceived merchant's trustworthiness, consumers’ lifestyle and consumers’ prior e-commerce experience have direct influence on the contrary, demographic profile, online shopping frequency and duration of daily internet usage found to have no impact on preferences. The website should have been improvised with features that consumers prefer such as ease of transaction, security and trustworthiness.