Factors influencing online shopping adoption among students in higher institutions of learning : case study of School of Statistics and Planning

Abstract

The objective of the study was to identify the factors that influence adoption of online shopping among students at Makerere University specifically those at School of Statistics and Planning. Specifically subjective norms, consumer attitude, perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness as factors influence adoption of online shopping were investigated and only age was found to have a significant effect on adoption of online shopping. Primary data was used in this study and was collected using questionnaires from 104 respondents who were at School of Statistics and Planning and analysis was done using frequency distribution tables, Pearson chi square test for independence and binary logistic regression. From the results, 62.5% of the respondents were males and 37.5% were females and most of the respondents (82.69%) were between 21-29 years, 16.35% were aged below 21 years and only 0.9615% were between 30-39 years. 94.23% of the respondents were undergraduates and only 5.77% were postgraduate students. Results from this study showed that the speed of online shopping website and ease of use of online shopping website had an association with adoption of online shopping by students under bivariate analysis but only the speed of the online shopping website (p= 0.011) significantly affected online shopping under multivariate analysis. The results from this study suggested that businesses that sell online products need to focus on speed of websites they use in order to increase their sales since increased speed of websites encourages more customers. More revision should also be put on the ease of use of website used by businesses because the easier the website the more number of customers encouraged to shop online.