Perceived risk factors associated with online shopping: a case of school of Statistics and Planning, Makerere University

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to establish the perceived risk factors associated with online purchasing among students at the School of Statistics and Planning basing on the following objectives; to evaluate the risk factors associated with online shopping among students at the School of Statistics and Planning; to ascertain whether experiencing a risk has a significant association with that risk’s perception among students at the School of Statistics and Planning across the components of examined risk categories establish whether the perception of risk has a significant association with the online purchasing behavior of students at the School of Statistics of Planning across the components of examined risk categories. The research was descriptive and qualitative in nature, involving mainly the descriptive statistics of the perceived risk factors associated with online shopping among students at the school of Statistics and Planning and the associations between experiencing examined risks and perception of those risks, and between perception of those risks and online shopping behavior of students. The data collection tool of choice was a questionnaire and simple random sampling was used to select the sample of 50 respondents. Data Analysis was carried out using SPSS software. Findings revealed that for majority of the delivery risk factors examined, the experience of them was low, probably attributable to the improvement of the online retail trade over the last several years and the entry of several players with better technological solutions. However, fear of them, especially fear of products ordered getting destroyed/damaged in transit was especially high. Several respondents also reported fearing being overcharged, receiving products whose quality differed from what they ordered online, and receiving their orders late, among others. The study concluded across most of the risk categories that experiencing of any of the risk factors had a statistically significant association with the perception of the risks (p < .05). However, the study found no association between respondents’ online payment information ever being stolen and them declining to make an online purchase due to fear that their online payment information was unsafe (p > .05). Across most risk categories examined, respondents that reported having suffered a certain risk factor were more likely to report fearing it (p < .05), and respondents that reported fearing a certain risks occurrence were more likely to report declining to make an online purchase due to said fear (p < .05).