Online shopping opens a new world of opportunities and experiences for customers. The array of products and services that online shopping offers at different price range makes it an unbelievable market place. Most consumers have open heartedly adapted to online shopping while others have fear of various types of risks. These risks act as deterrent to online shopping.
Consumers who buy new products are termed as innovators and the product which they buy are termed as innovations (Manzano, Navarre, Mafe and Blas (2009). Our study aimed at understanding the ‘innovative customers’, their categories and their levels of perceived risk towards online shopping. The study was conducted on 450 respondents from selected cities of Gujarat namely Ahmedabad, Surat, Rajkot and Vadodara who were approached through an online survey. The respondents were government and private employees, students and businessmen. Their perception of Financial Risk, Performance Risk, Social Risk, Time Risk, Psychological Risk and Privacy Risk for online shopping was tabulated and assessed using ANOVA (Analysis of Variance). Results of the study showed that there was statistically significant difference between various categories of innovators and the risk they perceived for shopping online. Highly innovative customers were found less sensitive towards financial, performance, social and psychological risk while the category of medium level innovative consumers were found to be less sensitive towards privacy risk.
consumer perceived risk, online shopping, innovators and types of risks
