research questions for online shopping

• 33 Online Shopping Questionnaire + [Template Examples]

Online shopping is increasingly becoming the most preferred shopping option across the globe. In 2019 alone, an estimated 1.92 billion people purchased goods or services online. This has created a need to offer good customer service to online shoppers, which is why you need an online shopping questionnaire. 

An online shopping questionnaire helps you to study users’ behaviors, experiences, and preferences as they shop items from your e-commerce store. In this article, we will discuss 33 questions you should include in your online shopping questionnaire to help you understand your customers’ needs. 

Common E-Commerce online shopping questions.

The types of questions listed in your online shopping survey must reflect the aims and objectives of the data collection process. Also, be sure to ask good survey questions that allow respondents to freely communicate their thoughts and perceptions without boxing them into a corner. 

Close-ended questions, open-ended questions , and dichotomous questions are examples of good survey questions that you can add to your online shopping survey. 

Close-Ended Questions

A close-ended question is a type of survey question that restricts respondents to a set of answer-options to choose from. In other words, the researcher provides options for you to choose from in response to the question. Close-ended questions help you to gather quantitative data . 

11 Close-ended Questions for an Online Shopping Questionnaire 

How often do you shop on this site, choose 2 products you buy frequently on this site..

• Accessories
• Perfumes and Oils
• Skincare products

What is the biggest challenge you face with shopping online?

• Slow checkout time
• Lack of products I want
• Slow webpage response time

How likely are you to recommend this site to other online shoppers?

• Very likely
• Somewhat likely
• Very unlikely

What is your biggest concern about online shopping?

• Breach of personal information
• Breach of payment details
• Poor internet connection

How much do you spend on online shopping every month?

• Less than 100 USD
• $100 – $500
• $500 – $1000
• More than 1000 USD

How many times do you shop online in a month?

• More than thrice

Which payment method do you prefer for online shopping?

• Payment Gateways
• Bank transfer

How would you rate your overall online shopping experience?

How likely are you to return to this webpage for your online shopping.

• Highly unlikely

What is your gender?

• Others. Please state
• Prefer not to say

Open-Ended Questions

This is a type of survey question that does not limit respondents to predetermined answers. Open-ended questions allow you to fully communicate your ideas and perceptions in response to a question. You can describe them as free-form survey questions. 

Examples of Open-Ended Questions in an Online Shopping Questionnaire   

• Describe your online shopping experience with us . This question allows your customer to provide a holistic view of their overall customer experience with your organization.
• Describe a negative experience you had while shopping online . This question allows customers to highlight any areas needing improvement in your online store.
• Describe a positive experience you had while shopping . Let customers identify strong points when it comes to online shopping with your brand.
• Why do you shop online with us? With this question, you would be able to identify the unique selling points of your brand across different customer segments.
• How old are you ? This question helps you to understand who your customers are; that is, the different age groups that your brand appeals to.

• Which products do you buy regularly? The responses to this question will help you to identify fast-moving products and to categorize your stock accordingly.
• Have you experienced any difficulty with adding products to your online cart? This question allows respondents to provide specific feedback on definite aspects of your online shopping operations.
• What do you think about the pricing of our products ? Use this question to collect feedback on product pricing to avoid overcharging or under-charging your customers.
• What do you think about the quality of our products? This question allows you to collect first-hand feedback from customers in terms of the quality of your product(s).  
• What other online store do you shop on? The answers to this question make it easy for you to identify your competition. You can leverage this data to create a better customer experience for your clients.
• What major challenges have you encountered while shopping on our site ? This question allows you to identify and address customer dissatisfaction easily. After identifying the challenges faced, you should work on providing sustainable solutions to them.

Dichotomous Question

A dichotomous question is a type of close-ended survey question that provides respondents with 2 opposite answer options for them to choose from. Common answer options in dichotomous questions include true/false, yes/no, fair/unfair, to mention a few. 

Dichotomous Question Samples for an Online Shopping Questionnaire

Did you enjoy the online shopping experience on our website.

This question allows customers to provide feedback on the overall shopping experience. 

Do you always shop on our website?

This simple question allows you to track consumer retention for your organization. 

Would you recommend our website to others?

Positive responses to this question serve as an indicator of a good customer experience. 

Our website provided the best online shopping experience.

Just like the first question in this section, this question helps you to gather feedback on your overall online shopping experience. 

Do you have any challenges with our checkout method?

Get direct feedback from customers about your e-commerce checkout process on your website. 

Our product prices are affordable.

This question allows you to gather feedback from customers about product pricing. 

Have you ever had a bad experience while shopping with us?

This question allows you to track and address customer dissatisfaction. 

Do you have any concerns about your data privacy while shopping online?

I always use the credit card option for my online shopping transactions..

This question prompts customers to indicate preferred payment options. 

I always use the bank transfer method for online shopping transactions.

Just like the question above, customers can provide responses here that allow you to identify preferred payment methods for your e-commerce store. 

Do you always shop online?

Responses to this question provide insight into customers’ behaviors and preferences. 

Can’t find your preferred Online Shopping survey template? Create yours for free with the easy-to-use Formplus builder

Common E-commerce Shopping Questionnaire on Products

Product-focused questions  help you know if you are solving your customers’ needs. For example, it helps you pull products from the market to protect your brand reputation and introduce new ones if there are opportunities in the market.

The following are questions to help you rate your product’s fit and value:

• On a scale of 1-10 where 1 is extremely dissatisfied and 10 is extremely satisfied, what’s your overall satisfaction with this product?
• How likely are you to recommend this product to others? (Use rating scale)
• How easy was it to find the product information on the website? (use rating scale)
• On a scale of 1-5, how satisfied are you with the product’s value for money?
• Did you have any issues setting up or using the product? (Yes/No, add comments if yes)

Online Shopping Questions Based on Customer Behavior

Shopping questions around customer behavior help you know your customer journey and find ways to improve their experience. For example, if 70% of customers find you through social media, it means your social media marketing strategy is working and you should invest more in this channel.

Let’s look at some questions that help you  understand customers’ journey  and interaction with your website:

• How did you find us?
• What drew you to this product?
• Have you read any reviews about this product or similar products?
• What are the biggest factors influencing your decision to purchase this product? (e.g., price, brand reputation, features)
• How easy was it to find the product you were looking for on our website?
• How comfortable and secure did you feel entering your payment information on our website?
• How likely are you to purchase from us again in the future?
• What can we do to improve your overall shopping experience with us?

Know What Your Customer Wants from You With the  Customer Needs Assessment Template

Shipping-Related Online Shopping Questions

Are your customers satisfied with your shipping process and what can you do to improve it? Here are some questions to help you find out:

• How satisfied are you with our shipping options? (Use rating scale)
• How easy was it to track your recent order? (Use rating scale)
• Would you be interested in paying a slight premium for guaranteed next-day delivery on certain items? (Yes/No)
• Would you be more likely to shop with us if we offered free shipping on orders over a specific threshold? (Yes/No)
• How can we make your shipping experience better? Open-ended)
• Have you had any problems shipping products to your location? (Yes/No, add form logic to personalize the questions). For example, if respondents select yes, it should take them to “What was the problem,” “Has it been resolved?” But if the respondents select no, it takes them to the next question

Online Shopping Surveys for Customer Support

While your products, website, and delivery chain should work perfectly, customers will still need support. Here are some common questions to help you measure their experience with your support:

• How happy were you with how customer support helped you? (Scale)
• Was it easy to contact customer support? (Yes/No)
• Did the customer support agent address your concerns and requests?
• Are you satisfied with our customer support?
• How long did it take to fix your problem?
• How could we have made your experience with customer support better? (Open-ended)
• on a scale of 1-10, rate your overall customer support experience.

Why Do You Need Online Shopping Surveys?

Shopping surveys help you know exactly what your store visitors and customers want from you; they are your roadmap to building and maintaining customer satisfaction.

Let’s look at some benefits of using online shopping surveys:

• Customer Insights – shopping surveys allow customers to tell you what they expect from you and if you match their expectations. Then you use this information to improve your products, services, website design, and other processes to meet their needs.
• Positive Brand Perception : Every interaction a potential customer has with your brand slowly shapes how they see you. So, asking them how they feel and implementing the changes they want, positions your brand as one that cares about its customers. This is how you build long-term relationships with customers and earn their trust.
• Competitive Advantage : Implementing changes from customer feedback also gives you an edge over your competitors. While your competitors are playing catch-up, you have already increased your customer satisfaction and they are recommending you as the best to the network.

How to Create an Online Shopping Questionnaire with Formplus  

With Formplus, you can create a smart online shopping questionnaire and either add the form to your website or share it with your customers using our multiple form sharing options. Formplus makes it easy for you to collect and process data from your customers, and this helps to improve customer experience and consumer satisfaction for your organization. 

Follow these steps to create your online shopping questionnaire from scratch using Formplus. 

• If you do not have a Formplus account, visit www.formpl.us to sign up for your Formplus account. If you have a Formplus account, visit the aforementioned website and click on the “Access Dashboard” button to gain access to your personalized Formplus dashboard.

• Once you have access to your Formplus dashboard, click on the “create new form” button to start building your online shopping survey. You’d find this button at the top left corner of your dashboard.

• Alternatively, you can modify any of the existing Formplus templates to suit your data collection needs. All you need to do is click on the “template” option on the dashboard navigation bar and then, follow the prompt.
• Now, you should be in the form builder. This is where you create your online shopping form. Start by adding the form title to the builder’s title bar.

• Next, go to the form fields section located on the left side of the form builder. There, you’d find more than 30 form field options including digital signature fields, payment fields, date-time validation, and so on. You can add any of these fields to your form by simply clicking on them or drag and drop the field from the builder’s inputs section.

• After adding the fields, click on the pencil icon just beside each field to access the form fields editing section. Here, you should add your question(s) and/or options.

• When you’ve added and modified all preferred fields accordingly, click on the save icon just at the top right corner of the builder. This automatically saves the form and takes you to the builder’s section.

• The Customize section is where you can change the look and feel of your online shopping survey. You can add preferred background images to your form, embed your organization’s logo, change the form font, or even customize the form layout using CSS.

• To add the online shopping survey to your website simply, go to the form builder’s “Share” page. You’d find it on the builder’s navigation panel right at the top corner.
• Click on the “embed” tab on the sidebar.
• You’d see 4 options here: Use as Pop-up, Use as iFrame embed, Embed in Facebook Page, and Embed in WordPress site.

• Click on “use as iFrame embed”  and copy the displayed code.

• Paste the code at the appropriate place to add it to your site.
• If you have a WordPress website, you can embed the form by choosing the “Embed in WordPress site” option, copy the shortcode, and paste it inside your WordPress editor.

• Copy the form link and share it with respondents.

Importance of an Online Shopping Survey  

E-commerce businesses, especially, should prioritize online shopping surveys because these data collection tools are key to business optimization, improved customer experience, brand loyalty, and increasing revenue. Here are 6 ways that online shopping surveys can make a difference in your business. 

• Understand Consumer Behaviour: With an online shopping survey, you’d have a better understanding of your customers’ online shopping behaviors with specific insights into their preferences, challenges, and experiences. This allows you to place them into distinct customer segments as part of market research. 
• Seamless Data Collection: An online shopping survey is a fast, easy, and convenient method of data collection . Unlike paper forms and other traditional survey methods, an online shopping survey can be filled on the go which allows you to gather real-time information from respondents, instantly. 
• With a smart online survey, you’d find it easier to highlight current trends and patterns in consumers’ behaviors.
• Improved Customer Experience and Satisfaction: It helps you to immediately identify and address any challenges faced by your customers and to resolve these challenges accordingly. If you embed the survey into your e-commerce website, customers complete the questionnaire once they are done shopping on your webpage. 
• Optimized Marketing Plans and Strategies: The data gathered via an online shopping survey can help you create a well-defined marketing plan and strategy for your organization. Having a clear knowledge of who your customers are and what different customer segments prefer typically empowers you to create specifically tailored adverts that appeal to each segment.
• It improves your organization’s response time to customers’ complaints.

Research shows that consumers spend an average of 5 hours shopping online every week and 92% of consumers shop online at least once a year . This, once again, emphasizes how much online shopping has become integral to our everyday lives. 

If you want to create unforgettable online shopping experiences for your target audience, you must understand customers’ experiences and expectations. An online shopping questionnaire is a simple but effective data tool that helps you to gather objective data from consumers. 

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70+ Online Shopping Questionnaire for Ecommerce Businesses

Kate Williams

Last Updated: 19 July 2024

22 min read

Table Of Contents

• 70+ Online Shopping Questionnaire
• General e-commerce online shopping questionnaire
• questionnaire on the products
• questionnaire about the website
• questionnaire based on customer behavior

Post-purchase online shopping questionnaire

• questionnaire for customer support

Shipping-related Online shopping questionnaire

• How to create online shopping surveys using AI?

Importance of online shopping surveys

Considering we shop for nearly everything online these days, from fashion to pharmaceuticals, does the experience of shopping online meet our satisfaction levels?

Let’s say I bought some apples from the shop, which were quite bad. I could tell the vendor my feedback straight away, or any other day, I stop by to get some apples. It’s just straight feedback, and for sure, it’ll be acted upon.

But how do we share our feedback about shopping items online? Without a way for customers to provide feedback and trust in its resolution, customer satisfaction, and retention may decline, reducing the overall trust in a service or brand.

If you run an e-commerce platform and haven’t focused on this aspect, consider integrating targeted questionnaires and feedback tools on your website to understand and enhance your customers’ shopping experiences.

And, this blog is specially made for you.

70+ Online shopping survey questions to ask

Understanding customer’s perspectives about shopping through your online channel is crucial for improving retention. This is mainly why I have curated 70+ questions for you and some exclusively designed free online shopping questionnaire templates you can start embedding on your site for customer feedback collection. Let’s go ahead.

Here’s an online shopping questionnaire created just for you!

Feel free to use it. Sign up with your email. Tweak the survey to your liking and send it out with your brand’s label.

Online Shopping Questionnaire Template

Preview Template

Explore more online shopping survey templates below.

Like the above, you could get a wide range of pre-made online shopping surveys that you can use well. Create a free account and start using free templates from SurveySparrow.

14-day free trial • Cancel Anytime • No Credit Card Required • No Strings Attached

Now, let’s go to the online shopping survey questions and free survey templates in detail.

General E-Commerce online shopping questionnaire

• “Were you satisfied with the overall experience?”
• “Would you buy from us again?”
• “Did you find the shopping experience pleasurable?”
• “Was the eCommerce website easy to navigate?”
• “Which are the areas where you would like us to improve?”
• “Was it easy to choose the products?”
• “Were you able to find enough information about the product on the website?”
• “Do you have any suggestions to improve the website experience?”
• “On a scale of 1-10, would you recommend our eCommerce website to friends or family?”
• “Would you like to suggest other products to be added to the site?”
• “How did you find our website?”
• “What are the channels you use to discover similar products like ours?”

Here’s a free E-Commerce shopping survey template. Please create a free account and check it out right now.

Free E-Commerce Survey Template

The above survey questionnaire about online shopping is a general eCommerce one that aims to understand the customer’s experience with your brand. The answers to the above questions will give you deep insights into how your eCommerce shopping site is running and help you with your lead-generation activities.

Sign up with your email and start exploring more templates from SurveySparrow. It’s complelty free!

Imagine someone saying they will not buy from your brand again (question #2). You can send them a follow-up question requesting the reason for their stance. You could also try to buy their goodwill by offering a free product or an attractive discount on their next purchase. Make sure that you solve any current issue they are facing. 

Online shopping questionnaire on the products

• “Why do you prefer our product over our competitor’s?”
• “Have you ordered from our shopping site before?”
• “Were you able to find various products to choose from?”
• “Did you find sufficient information about the product listed on the site?”
• “Which were the other products that you were considering before finally buying this product?”
• “Does our product meet your personal/business requirements?”
• “On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the design of the product?”
• “On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the features in the product?”
• “Are you happy with your decision to buy this product?”
• “What is your favorite feature about the product?
• “What is your least favorite feature about the product?”
• “Do you find our product easy to use?”
• “What are the pain points that our product solves for you?”
• “Are you happy to pay the retail price of this product?”
• “Is our product better than that of the competitors?”
• “What made you choose our product?”
• “If given a chance to make the same purchase again, would you buy our product?”
• “What are the features in our product that you feel can be removed?”
• “Would you like us to add more features and functionality into the product?”
• “What are the must-have features that you expect in a product similar to ours?”
• “What was your most important consideration while buying the product?”
• “Did you find ways to ease your confusion (if any) when finally deciding to buy the product?”

Check this free e-commerce survey questionnaire on products

Free Online Shopping Questionnaire for Product Feedback

The final quality of the product has a huge bearing on the purchasing decision of the buyers. But, it would be unwise to ignore many other factors that depend on this decision. You need to make it easy for the customers to buy from you. The product description should be written in an unambiguous manner. Taking feedback from your customers will give you a goldmine of information that will help to create a better product. 

You will understand what matters to your customers. Getting customer feedback will make you more customer-centric. It will change the way you design the products. It will reflect how you present the final product to the customer. Remember this, every single aspect of the product matters. 

Online shopping questionnaire about the website

• “Do you enjoy our website’s navigation?”
• “Were you able to find products with ease?”
• “Did the search bar work the way it was supposed to?”
• “How often do you visit our website?”
• “Do you visit our website because of any other prompts?”
• “What are the things about our website you would like us to change?”
• “Do you like the colors we used in the website?”
• “Is the content in the website evenly spaced for the products to stand out?”
• “Did it take a lot of time for the website to load?”
• “Have you ever had a bad experience on our website?”
• “What are your recommendations to improve our website?”
• “Would you recommend our website to friends and family if they are looking for products similar to the ones we stock?”
• “Is our website better than our competitors?”

Yes, here’s a free survey template for you.

Free Online Shopping Questionnaire for Website

The eCommerce website is a valuable piece of real estate. No matter how good the products you manufacture are, if the website is not functional or easy to use, visitors will pop out as soon as they come in.

Online shopping questionnaire based on customer behavior

Let us look at a few questionnaires on consumer buying behavior online shopping.

• “Are you comfortable making payments online?”
• “What issues did you face when shopping online on our website?” 
• “How was the shopping experience at our website?”
• “How was your checkout experience at the online store?”
• “Do you feel safe shopping online?”
• “Have you ever faced a bad payment-related experience while shopping online?”
• “What payment options do you prefer on the online store?”

Use this survey template for free! Check it out now.

Free Customer Analysis Questionnaire

Understanding how users feel about buying online will give you an idea about their shopping behavior. People feel safe these days shopping online using their credit cards, but there will be anomalies. Therefore, you need to figure out the payment options that they are all right using. 

Sending an online survey immediately after they make a purchase will give you an idea about your overall experience with your brand. It will give you pointers on areas where there can be an improvement. You can use the data you gather from the surveys to improve your shopping experience. 

• “Are you happy with the products lined up for the category you were searching for?”
• “How was your overall shopping experience?”
• “On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your shopping experience?” 
• “Did you purchase all the products that you wanted?”
• “How easy was it to finalize the item you wanted?”
• “What can we do to improve the shopping experience?”
• “What made you abandon the cart?”

Here’s a cute post-purchase survey template from SurveySparrow.

Post Purchase Survey Template

Online shopping questionnaire for customer support

If your customer support is not great, then you will end up alienating them, and increase churn. Not to mention the fact that you will turn away new customers. Giving adequate attention to customer support is the bare minimum that you can do. There are Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) questions to gauge how satisfied your customers are with you. 

Let us look at a few questionnaires on online shopping customer satisfaction

• “Was it easy to get in touch with the customer support team?”
• “Did they spend adequate time listening to your issue?”
• “On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate our customer support?”
• “Where do you think we can improve on the customer support front?”
• “How fast did they resolve your issue?”
• “Did the customer support team respond immediately to your complaint?”
• “Would you recommend our customer support staff to friends or family?”

Want to get an online shopping questionnaire for customer support at no cost? or Create one using SurveySparrow’s AI survey builder?

Sign Up Now and Get Yours. 

Imagine ordering a product only to find that it will take a fortnight for the delivery to happen. You don’t want to have a lackadaisical attitude when it comes to delivering the product. It is the responsibility of the online shopping company to ensure that the product gets delivered on time. 

• “Did you get the product delivered on time?”
• “Are you satisfied with the shipping and delivery experience, on a scale of 1 to 10?”
• “Did the agent call you during the drop?”
• “Was the logistics partner’s behavior professional?”
• “Would you recommend our shipping and delivery services to friends or family?”
• “Where do you think we should improve our delivery services?”
• “What did you like about our shipping and delivery?”
• “Did the website give you timely updates on when you will receive the product?”

Create the best online shopping questionnaire for Free

Sign Up with SurveySparrow for Free & Start Creating Survey in Few Minutes!

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How to Create an online shopping questionnaire using AI

• Create a free account here
•  Log in to your SurveySparrow and click New Survey.
• Click on the “AI do the magic” tab.

4. No specific prompts for your survey; you can also choose to use a sample prompt from the available options. dd or customize your survey with relevant questions. Once you’re all set with the questions, click Preview Survey to get a glimpse of your survey.

5. Feel free to customize the survey design, theme, and even the branching logic for question types. You’re all set to go.

Looks Good Right? Do you want to try? Sign up here and explore for free.

eCommerce businesses have a lot to learn about their customers’ needs, requirements, and motivation to buy, which keep varying. The results from the survey can help in optimizing the website, improving the shopping experience, changing business tactics, etc. 

Let us look at why eCommerce stores should regularly conduct surveys:

1. Helps with data collection

Online shopping surveys are great for collecting data about customers, their motivations, purchasing behavior, requirements, and so on. You will get to know about their challenges, experiences, and preferences. You can gather information in real-time using which you can make immediate changes to your business. 

2. Better customer experience

When a customer buys from you one time and never shops from you again, you will never know what happened. Conducting a survey as soon as they shop from you or a few months after they use your service is a great way to find out if they were dissatisfied with anything. You can take remediation steps immediately to address them. It might work in your favor as they will be pleased that you solved the frictions that they faced while shopping. They might even recant on their decision of not shopping from you again. 

3. Helps improve your marketing strategy

You can use the data gathered from the online shopping survey to understand if your marketing strategy is on point. If you get to know that a majority of your target market is on Instagram through the survey, there’s your cue to change your strategy . You will have a better understanding of your customers. It will also help you create content for each segment so that you hit the right nerves. 

Here is a few online shopping questionnaires you can ask:

• What are the social media sites you use to search for products?
• Where do you access most content from?

4. Understand why your product isn’t selling

Not having the expected sales from your online store can be terrifying. You need to know why sales aren’t happening. What better way than asking your website visitors directly? 

You can ask the following online shopping questionnaire:

• What stopped you from buying the product?
• What did you dislike about the product? 

5. Understand why people leave your site

Sending an exit-intent pop-up survey when a user leaves the webpage would be an easy way to collect information about why people leave the site. Ask questions to customers who were almost ready to buy, but backed out from doing so. 

• Didn’t like our product? We’d love to know why.
• What can we do to make you buy from us?
• May we know why you exited the shopping cart?

6. Understand your pricing strategy

For online stores that are still unclear about their pricing or want to know what customers think about it, no better way than surveys. You don’t want to scare away potential buyers by overpricing. Nor do you want to underprice your products. Ask the right questions to understand if your pricing is right. 

Here are a few online shopping questionnaire you can ask:

• Are you satisfied with our pricing?
• Are we better priced when compared against competitors?

7. Helps gather testimonials

People trust when others like them recommend products or services. They are more likely to listen to them than advertisements on TV. Online shopping surveys are also a great opportunity for online stores to gather testimonials in a subtle manner. 

• How has our product helped you solve your problems?
• Would you miss our products if we shut shop today?
• Please tell us how you feel about your entire experience with us.

8. Find product market fit

Do your potential customers want the product that you are selling? Is there a market for it? Understanding the demand for your product is pivotal, as it can help you with managing your inventory too. 

• What’s the most important feature you use in our product? 
• Is there an indispensable part about our product? 

9. Measure word-of-mouth recommendations

The NPS survey tells whether your customers would recommend your products or not. For a customer to talk about your products to others, they have to be really fond of the product. Finding out those who give a score of 9 or 10 (called Promoters) will help you identify those who can be made ambassadors for your brand. 

• Why did you give this score?
• What can we do to make things right for you?

10. Get your communication right:

The way you communicate with your existing and potential customers matters a lot. Does it address their pain points? Are your points clear and concise or do you keep rambling? Does your communication address the best parts of your products? Asking the right questions will help you figure out how your marketing messages work for you. 

• What do you like most about our brand?
• Do you enjoy our advertisements?
• How has been our after-sales service? 
• If you could describe the brand in a single word, what would it be?
• What do you think is unique about our brand?

Wrapping up

Consumers spend hours researching about the product before they open their purse strings. Getting a peek into their minds will clearly help your brand. To create remarkable shopping experience for your customers, you need to have a clear understanding of their expectations, pain points, needs, and requirements.

Using the right online survey tool and asking the right online shopping questionnaire will help you gather information that can catapult your brand to the next level. Online shopping survey questions examples in the article can be used in your online shopping surveys. 

If you are looking for the an online survey tool to gather relevant data of shoppers, SurveySparrow is the tool to choose. It has a myriad of eclectic features that make data gathering a breeze. Get in touch with us, and we will show you how our online survey tool can help you. 

Product Marketing Manager at SurveySparrow

Excels in empowering visionary companies through storytelling and strategic go-to-market planning. With extensive experience in product marketing and customer experience management, she is an accomplished author, podcast host, and mentor, sharing her expertise across diverse platforms and audiences.

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Ultimate 70-Question Online Shopping Survey for E-Commerce Success

70 Online Shopping Questionnaire for E-commerce Businesses

In the era of digitalization, online shopping has become a common method of acquiring goods and services. It offers convenience, variety, and accessibility to customers throughout the world. With the proliferation of online stores, however, customer satisfaction has become a major concern for businesses. This article examines the key online shopping questionnaires that contribute to customer satisfaction in online shopping.

General E-Commerce Online Shopping Questionnaire

There is no one “best” general e-commerce online shopping questionnaire as it largely depends on the specific research objectives and target audience. However, here are some key elements to consider when creating a general e-commerce online shopping questionnaire:

• 1How often do you shop online?
• What is your preferred payment method for online purchases?
• How satisfied are you with the website’s user interface?
• How easy was it to find the products you were looking for?
• Were there any issues with the checkout process?
• Would you recommend this website to others?
• How satisfied were you with the customer service?
• Did the website provide enough information about the products?
• How long did it take for your order to arrive?
• How likely are you to make another purchase from this website?

Overall, a well-designed general e-commerce online shopping questionnaire can provide businesses with valuable insights into their customers’ online shopping behavior, preferences, and satisfaction levels. This information can be used to improve the online shopping experience, optimize marketing and sales strategies, and increase customer loyalty and retention.

Online Shopping Questionnaire On The Products

• How often do you purchase products from our website?
• Which product category do you usually purchase from?
• How satisfied are you with the quality of our products?
• Are there any specific products that you think we should add to our collection?
• How likely are you to recommend our products to someone else?
• How frequently do you purchase products from our competitors?
• What do you think about the pricing of our products?
• How satisfied are you with the variety of products available on our website?
• Do you feel that our products meet your expectations?
• Would you like to see more product reviews or ratings on our website?

Online Shopping Questionnaire About The Website

• How frequently do you visit our website for online shopping?
• How easy is it to navigate through our website?
• Were you able to find the products you were looking for easily?
• How would you rate the load time of our website?
• Are our product descriptions clear and informative?
• How would you rate the overall design of our website?
• Did you experience any issues while placing your order? If yes, please elaborate.
• How satisfied were you with the checkout process?
• Were you able to track your order easily?
• Is there anything you would suggest we improve on our website to enhance your online shopping experience?

The website for an eCommerce business is a valuable asset, and even if the products are of high quality, a poorly functioning or difficult-to-use website will cause visitors to quickly leave. In other words, the website plays a crucial role in attracting and retaining customers, and it must be optimized for functionality and user experience to ensure that customers stay and engage with the business.

Online Shopping Questionnaire Based On Customer Behavior

• How often do you shop online?
• What motivates you to shop online instead of visiting a physical store?
• How long do you typically spend browsing products before making a purchase?
• What factors influence your decision to purchase from a particular website?
• Have you ever abandoned a shopping cart before completing a purchase? If so, why?
• How often do you read customer reviews before making a purchase?
• How likely are you to recommend our website to a friend or family member?
• Do you prefer to shop on a mobile device or a desktop/laptop computer?
• Have you ever purchased on our website using a mobile device?
• How important is the ability to track your order and receive updates throughout the shipping process to you?

Gaining insight into users’ attitudes toward online shopping can provide valuable information about their purchasing behavior. While many people feel secure using their credit cards to shop online, there may be exceptions. Thus, it’s important to identify which payment methods customers are comfortable using to ensure a positive shopping experience.

Post-Purchase Online Shopping Questionnaire

• How was your overall shopping experience on our website?
• How satisfied were you with the quality of the products you purchased?
• Did the products you received match the descriptions on our website?
• How satisfied were you with the shipping/delivery process?
• Was there anything you found confusing or difficult during the checkout process?
• Did you have any issues with payment or billing?
• Was customer service able to assist you with any questions or issues you had?
• Is there anything else you would like to share about your experience shopping with us?

Online Shopping Questionnaire For Customer Support

Neglecting the quality of customer support can lead to customer dissatisfaction, and churn, and can even deter potential new customers. It is imperative to prioritize and provide adequate attention to customer support. One way to gauge customer satisfaction is by using metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) through targeted survey questions to determine the level of customer satisfaction with the business.

• Was it easy to get in touch with our customer support team?
• Did our customer support staff solve your query or concern on time?
• How would you rate the professionalism and knowledge of our customer support staff?
• Was our customer support staff able to address all of your questions and concerns?
• Did our customer support staff provide clear and helpful solutions to your problems?
• How satisfied are you with the level of support you received from our customer support staff?
• Did our customer support team exceed your expectations?
• What improvements would you suggest for our customer support services?
• Did our customer support team follow up with you after resolving your query or concern?
• How likely are you to recommend our online store based on your experience with our customer support team?

Shipping-Related Online Shopping Questionnaire

Picture ordering a product and discovering that it will take two weeks for it to arrive. It’s important to take prompt and efficient action to ensure that the product is delivered on time, and not to be indifferent about it. It’s the online shopping company’s responsibility to ensure timely delivery of the product.

• Did you receive your order on time?
• Were you satisfied with the shipping options offered during checkout?
• Did you receive regular updates regarding the status of your shipment?
• Were you satisfied with the condition of your order upon delivery?
• Was the shipping cost reasonable?
• Did you encounter any issues with the shipping process?
• Was the shipping carrier used for your order reliable?
• Were the shipping and handling fees clearly communicated during checkout?
• How important is fast shipping to you when making an online purchase?
• Would you be willing to pay extra for expedited shipping in the future?

Why Online Shopping Survey is Important

Online shopping surveys are an essential tool for businesses and organizations to understand the preferences, behavior, and expectations of their customers who shop online. With the exponential growth of e-commerce in recent years, businesses must have a deep understanding of the online shopping experience to make informed decisions that can help grow their business.

Here are some of the key reasons why online shopping surveys are essential:

Gain insights into customer preferences: Online shopping surveys allow businesses to gain insights into customer preferences by asking specific questions about product categories, pricing, payment options, and delivery methods. By collecting this information, businesses can tailor their offerings to better meet customer needs and preferences.

Understand customer behavior: Online shopping surveys can help businesses understand how their customers behave when they shop online. For example, businesses can gain insights into the frequency of purchases, the average order value, and the time spent browsing different product categories. By understanding customer behavior, businesses can optimize their online store to improve customer engagement, increase sales, and build customer loyalty.

Identify areas for improvement: Online shopping surveys can help businesses identify areas for improvement in their online shopping experience. By asking customers about their pain points and frustrations, businesses can address these issues and improve their online store’s functionality and design to enhance the customer experience.

Measure customer satisfaction: Online shopping surveys can help businesses measure customer satisfaction with their online shopping experience. By collecting feedback from customers, businesses can identify areas where they are excelling and areas where they need to improve to meet customer expectations.

Gather feedback on new products: Online shopping surveys can help businesses gather feedback on new products they are considering launching. By asking customers about their preferences and opinions on new products, businesses can make informed decisions about product development and marketing.

In conclusion, customer surveys play a vital role in understanding the needs, expectations, and preferences of customers in the context of online shopping. By asking targeted questions about various aspects such as product quality, website usability, customer support, and delivery times, businesses can gain valuable insights to improve their offerings and provide a better customer experience. The data collected from customer surveys can help businesses make informed decisions that drive customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue. Thus, conducting customer surveys is an essential tool for any online shopping company that wishes to succeed and stay ahead of the competition.

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How to use surveys to grow your ecommerce business (+ 55 expert questions)

Whether you get one or one thousand responses to your ecommerce survey, asking the right questions guarantees you’ll discover something about your website, customers, and products you can use to optimize the buying experience and increase conversions.

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In this guide, we take you through what ecommerce surveys are, how to set them up, and which questions to ask where. We also showcase real examples of successful surveys that led to business growth.

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What is an ecommerce survey?

Benefits of using surveys on your ecommerce store, 55 ecommerce survey questions used by experts, website survey questions, exit-intent survey questions, post-purchase survey questions, how to run a successful ecommerce survey, start surveying your customers today.

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An ecommerce survey (also known as an online shopping survey) is a set of one or more questions asked to online store visitors and customers before, during, or after the point of purchase. 

Ecommerce surveys questions can be:

Close-ended : multiple choice questions that give you quantitative (i.e. numerical) data to measure and track change over time (e.g. 72% of visitors love the new homepage) 

Open-ended : questions people can answer in their own words—better for understanding context and generating qualitative customer data you can’t infer from other sources

There are two main types of survey:

On-site survey : a popover or fullscreen survey that collects feedback when people visit a specific website page or take an action like trying to exit the page

Link survey : a dedicated survey link that can be shared with customers via email, social media, support chat, or elsewhere

Collecting (and, more importantly, acting on) customer feedback has compounding benefits for both your customers and your ecommerce business.

The questions below break down what to ask, where and when to survey customers, and how to interpret the results. You’ll also see real examples from user experience (UX) and website experts who’ve used ecommerce surveys to drive growth. 

Website surveys give you feedback from store visitors before the point of conversion . Use them to find bugs and see if your page designs and messaging are working as intended.

Homepage survey questions

Your homepage is likely a big source of traffic for your store and the entry point for many visitors. This makes it the ideal place to ask shoppers why they’ve chosen to visit.

For example, The Lowry Gift Shop, a British museum store, used Hotjar Surveys to ask homepage visitors:

What are you looking for today?

This question helps you understand what people expect to see on your homepage, giving you insight into how to organize its layout and menu navigation to direct visitors to the most popular products and categories.

Alternatively, you could ask: 

If you did not make a purchase today, what stopped you?

What are your first impressions of our website?

What could be improved on the website?

Is there anything stopping you from purchasing today?

Landing page survey questions

Landing pages are targeted entry points to your website and crucial for sending traffic down the funnel, making them prime real estate for a survey asking people how they found your site. 

For example, furniture store Made used Hotjar Surveys to run a traffic attribution survey on an online showroom landing page, asking:

How did you hear about this [website/page/product]?

A landing page survey helps you attribute the success of offline campaigns and word-of-mouth referrals while the source is still fresh in the visitor’s mind.

You could also ask:

What led you to our website today?

How did you find out about us?

What inspired you to come to [website]?

Product category and search page survey questions

When shoppers browse product category pages, perform a product search, or try to filter a product list, it’s because they’re trying to find the items they need. Surveying users at this stage will tell you what to change to make finding products easier for shoppers . 

For example, web design agency NerdCow used Hotjar Surveys on image marketplace The Transport Library to troubleshoot an issue they’d seen in ecommerce recordings : people were scrolling for hours through the site’s product database but not clicking through to individual products.

To find out why, the team asked two questions:

Do you have trouble finding the product?

Can you tell us which product you hoped to find?

The survey results showed that repeat visitors were browsing the entire product library trying to find new items. The solution: they added a label to new products and a badge to show users which products they had already viewed, ultimately contributing to a 3x increase in sales. 

Product listing page (PLP) survey questions

Individual product pages give visitors important information about what they’re buying: pricing, photos, descriptions, and shipping and returns policies. Getting feedback from customers here can help you understand what visitors need to know before they click the all-important ‘add-to-cart’ button . 

For example, skincare store Neeta Naturals used Hotjar Surveys on product listing pages to ask:

How can we improve this page? Is anything missing?

It’s difficult to guess what could be missing so using an open-ended question here means visitors can tell you in their own words how to improve your product listing pages . 

Also consider:

What is your biggest fear or concern about purchasing this item?

What is your biggest frustration or question with finding a new [product]?

What other information would you like to see on this page?

Do you have any questions before you complete your purchase?

Shopping cart survey questions

A shopping cart survey helps you spot issues that could lead to cart abandonment. 

If you’re using Hotar, you can trigger a shopping cart survey to appear only when people have spent 30 seconds or more on the page. You won’t interrupt a happy customer who’s ready to check out but will likely catch someone who’s getting confused by something. 

For example, designer fashion ecommerce store Riot used a Hotjar Survey on their checkout page to ask:

If you could change anything on this page, what would you have us do?

Leaving the questions open-ended means visitors can answer anything, from a missing payment option to confusion about delivery times, and the team can learn what’s stopping people from continuing .

You can also ask:

What information is missing or would make your decision to buy easier?

What’s stopping you from buying?

Finding out why people leave your store, especially if they’re at the checkout stage, can help you reduce bounce rate and improve conversion rates.

If you’re using Hotjar, exit surveys are extremely easy to create: simply select the ‘page abandonment’ trigger (desktop only) in the survey behavior dropdown during setup.

For example, UX/UI agency Turum-burum used a Hotjar exit-intent pop-up survey on the checkout page of Ukrainian fashion ecommerce store Intertop, asking:

Why would you like to stop placing the order?

They found that the majority of respondents (48.6%) were leaving because they were having difficulty placing their order. 

The team was then able to troubleshoot the checkout funnel—with the help of Hotjar’s Heatmaps and Recordings tools—and saw that the customer registration form was confusing people and leading to drop-offs. By A/B testing a simpler checkout experience, the team grew average revenue per user (ARPU) by 11% and checkout bounce rate decreased by 13%.

Post-purchase surveys take place after the point of conversion on your store. 

Success page survey questions

Ecommerce customers are usually directed to a success page (like a ‘thank you’ page) immediately after making a purchase. Triggering a survey here lets you collect customer comments while the experience is still very fresh in their minds .

For example, European airline Ryanair used Hotjar Surveys to run a success page survey after customers booked a flight, asking an open-ended question to discover common customer pain points . Once the team had a comprehensive understanding of every potential issue with the booking process, they switched to multiple-choice questions, asking:

How strongly do you agree or disagree with the following statement (0-10)? “It’s very easy to [complete action] on this website.”

How strongly do you agree or disagree with the following statement (0-10): “I was able to [complete action] and purchase products without being interrupted.”

Please rate how satisfied you were with the experience of using [Website name] today (0-10).

[If rating is 0-4] Can you please tell us the main reason you gave that rating? (multiple choice)

By asking close-ended questions on a scale from 0 to 10, the team was able to quantify the website’s ease of use and customer satisfaction and create company benchmarks to track customer experience month to month. 

How would you rate your overall experience?

What’s the one thing that nearly stopped you from buying from us?

Which other options did you consider before choosing [product name]?

What would persuade you to use us more often?

What was your biggest challenge, frustration, or problem in finding the right [product type] online?

Please list the top three things that persuaded you to use us instead of a competitor.

What other products would you like to see us offer?

Was there anything about this checkout process we could improve?

What was your biggest fear or concern about purchasing from us?

What persuaded you to complete the purchase of the item(s) in your cart today?

If you could no longer use [product name], what’s the one thing you would miss the most?

Was there any information you would have liked to have known before you made a purchase?

You don’t need to ask everything all at once : use other tools like Google Analytics and ecommerce heatmaps to find a pre-purchase problem to troubleshoot, then use a short thank you page survey to let customers tell you what almost put them off. 

NPS survey questions

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a quantitative metric that measures how likely a customer is to recommend you to others. The score is calculated based on a single question:

On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?

Your NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of ‘detractors’ (customers who score you 6 or lower) from the percentage of ‘promoters’ (customers who score a 9 or 10). NPS is popular because it’s used to compare performance between companies and across industries —there are benchmarks for each.

You can ask an NPS question at different stages, from immediately after purchase to after a customer has received their order:

Considering your experience with us so far, how likely are you to recommend [company name] to a friend or colleague? (0-10)

Now that you’ve received your [product], how likely are you to recommend [company name] to a friend or colleague? (0-10)

We also recommend tweaking the wording to suit your target audience: not every ecommerce store has mass market appeal, which could confuse respondents. Instead, ask:

How likely are you to recommend [product/brand] to someone like you?

By asking a follow-up question on your NPS survey , you’ll learn why customers rate you a certain way. 

Try questions like:

Why would you (not) recommend us?

What did we do well?

What can we improve on?

What can/should we do to WOW you?

Customer satisfaction and effort survey questions

A customer satisfaction survey measures what customers think about every touchpoint they had with your ecommerce brand. You can ask binary (yes/no, 😃/☹️) questions.

Consider follow-ups like:

Did our product do what you wanted it to do?

How happy are you with your overall experience today?

What did you love most about the experience?

What could we have done to improve the experience?

What almost stopped you from completing your purchase?

You can also find out the customer effort score (CES) for any part of the buying journey by asking:

How easy was it for you to complete [action] today? (1-7)

Learning what causes customer (dis)satisfaction is not just about fixing issues: you can also use the insights to increase the effectiveness of campaigns. 

For example, satellite navigation manufacturer TomTom used Hotjar Surveys to ask satisfied customers why they made a purchase . The team then used the feedback to write compelling copy for email campaigns and landing pages, resulting in a 491% increase in email marketing click-through rate (CTR) and a 49% conversion rate increase for landing pages.

Customer support survey questions

Asking customers how they feel right after a customer support chat will help you improve the service they receive next time and your ecommerce website messaging.

Ask questions like:

Did your problem get resolved today?

Were you able to find the information you were looking for?

How satisfied are you with our support?

How would you rate our service on a scale of 0-10? (0=terrible, 10=stellar)

How would you rate our support on a scale of 0-10?

How easy was it to solve your problem today?

What information could we make clearer for you next time?

While the idea of opening the floodgates to customer feedback can be daunting, setting up an ecommerce survey couldn’t be easier. 

Here’s how to create an on-site or link survey with Hotjar in five minutes or less (if you’re not already a customer, welcome! 👋— get started with our free plan or free trial here ). 

1. Create a new survey

Hit the Survey icon on the left sidebar menu, then click the ‘New survey’ button in the top right.

2. Choose a survey template or start from scratch

Search or browse our free survey templates and click the one you need (in this example, an NPS survey), or click ‘Start from scratch’ if you want a blank slate. 

3. Customize your survey

If you selected a template in the previous step, your survey details will already be filled out, but you can still customize:

Survey name and description : this is just for you and your team—it’s handy if you’re creating multiple surveys

Survey type : decide if you want your survey to appear on a website page as people browse, or be accessed by link for an email survey

Survey questions : edit the question wording and answer type (e.g. open text or multiple choice). You’ll see a live preview of your survey on the right as you make changes.

Appearance : customize the survey to match your brand’s colors if desired

Targeting : choose where the survey will appear by device, page, or user attribute

Behavior : decide if you want the survey to show straight away or when a user scrolls or exits a page

Forward Response : (optional) get responses sent straight to Slack, email, or other tools via the Zapier integration

When you’re happy with the settings, toggle the survey to ‘active’ and hit the ‘Create survey’ button—your survey is now live and ready for responses!

💡Pro tip : when you’re ready to view your survey results, Hotjar automatically generates charts for multiple-choice responses. For open-ended questions, use our free open-ended question analysis template to quickly quantify all your feedback into categories.

Our spreadsheet template helps you quickly categorize open-ended survey responses

Power up your surveys with session recordings

By now, you probably have a good idea of what to ask your customers and potential customers and how to use ecommerce survey data to improve customer experience and sales.

When you’re ready to level up, connect survey responses (what users say ) with ecommerce recordings (what users do ) to gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior and you’ll be well on the way to building a better ecommerce experience than your competitors.

Ecommerce survey FAQs

An online shopping survey, also referred to as an ecommerce questionnaire, is a set of one or more questions posed to visitors and customers of an online store before, during, or after a purchase.

How long should an ecommerce survey be?

An ecommerce survey should be as short as possible. If you’re interrupting the customer journey with a pre-purchase survey, a single question is usually sufficient. A post-purchase survey can be longer, but try to keep it around three to five questions to maintain a good completion rate. Use conditional survey logic to avoid asking irrelevant questions based on previous answers. 

How can I analyze survey data?

If you’re using Hotjar, all multiple-choice survey responses are automatically displayed as bar charts so you can easily view and share survey results with your team. For open-ended questions, we recommend you use our free open-ended question analysis template to sort responses into categories and visualize the most popular insights. 

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• 50 Key Questions for Ecommerce Cust ...

50 Key Questions for Ecommerce Customers You Should Ask in Your Survey

Forecasts show that U.S. consumers are on track to spend $933.30 billion on ecommerce in 2021, a 17.9% year-over-year increase. And, by 2025, the percentage of ecommerce sales is expected to be 23.6% of total sales. Compared to a mere 11.0% in 2019, it’s fair to say the future is looking bright for ecommerce.

As sales increase, so does the competition as more and more businesses are shifting to an online presence – especially after brick-and-mortar companies took a serious hit during COVID lockdowns.

How are you going to compete?

While there’s not one simple answer (because everyone would be doing it already), one of the best ways to stand apart is to know your brand inside and out – everything from brand awareness, to customer demographics, to product feedback, to website design, and more.

You might have already guessed where we’re going with this. In order to fully understand the strengths and weaknesses of your ecommerce business, you need to collect and respond to feedback from the customers who are buying and using your products.

Why Should You Collect Data from Ecommerce Surveys?

There are many types of surveys, and each one serves a specific purpose. An employee engagement survey , for example, provides important but very different data than a brand perception survey .

An ecommerce survey, as the name suggests, is used to understand a customer’s experience throughout the entire online purchasing process as they navigated your website.

Ecommerce surveys can help you to:

• Segment your consumer base. By dividing your customers into groups based on demographics and buying behaviors, you’ll be more successful with your targeting methods.
• Tailor your marketing strategies. From reaching new customers to upselling and cross-selling on your website, there’s a lot of potential to boost your marketing efforts based on the data collected in an ecommerce survey.
• Build a customer persona. In addition to knowing how to target future customers, you need to know who you are targeting. Surveys help businesses learn about their customers and the changing market.
• Identify trends. These can be positive trends, such as high demand for a particular product, or negative trends, like complaints about your website’s functionality. You can also follow up with a customer satisfaction survey later to measure the success of any updates you implemented.
• Pinpoint opportunities to improve your customers’ experience. People abandon their cart for a variety of reasons – unexpected shipping charges, being forced to create an account in order to check out, etc. Unless you ask, you probably won’t be aware of problems that may be costing you sales.
• Forecast inventory demands. Needless to say, seeing almost every product on your website showing as out of stock isn’t a good shopping experience. With enough data and the right analytical tools, you can better manage your inventory to make sure you’re well stocked without being overstocked.

50 Important Survey Questions for Ecommerce Customers

As you put together your ecommerce survey, it’s important to think through the various stages of a customer’s purchase cycle.

Below, we’ve put together the top 50 questions you should consider adding to your ecommerce survey.

1. Pre-Purchase Ecommerce Survey Questions

Not all of your customers will complete a purchase on your website, but it’s still important to get their feedback and learn how you can improve.

• What was your first impression of our website?
• What is the purpose of your website visit?
• How did you learn about our company?
• Did you experience any difficulty navigating our website?
• How do you feel about the website design and layout?
• Who are you shopping for?
• How likely would you be to visit our website again?
• How can we improve your experience in the future?

2. Post-Purchase Ecommerce Survey Questions

If your website visitors convert into paying customers, seize this opportunity to learn about what influenced them to convert and how you can boost your sales in the future.

• How satisfied were you with the availability of the products on our website?
• If your preferred product was out of stock, did you receive a notification when it became available again?
• What other products, sizes, and color options would you like to see in the future?
• How would you rate your overall shopping and checkout experience?
• Did you feel secure sharing your card information on our site?
• Did you have a hassle-free checkout?
• Did we offer your preferred payment method? If not, please let us know your preference.
• What factor(s), if any, almost prevented you from completing your checkout?
• How likely are you to make a purchase from our business again?
• How would you rate the speed of our website?
• How likely are you to recommend our brand to others?
• What is your primary reason for choosing our brand over our competitors?

3. Product Quality and Reviews Survey Questions

Understand how the product quality compared to expectations and how reviews influenced your customers’ purchase decision.

• How much did you trust the product reviews?
• How helpful are product reviews to you when deciding whether to make a purchase?
• How much does an overall product rating affect your decision to buy?
• How satisfied are you with the quality of the products you received?
• Compared to our competitors, how would you rate the quality of our products?
• Did you find the range of products we offer to be sufficient?
• Did the website include enough product details for you to feel well-informed about your purchase?
• Do you feel the product descriptions on our website were accurate when you received the actual product?
• Do you usually find alternatives of the same product offered on other websites?

4. Customer Support Survey Questions

90% of Americans rely on customer service as a primary factor when they’re deciding whether or not to do business with a company.

• Did the customer service representative solve your issue?
• How helpful and knowledgeable was the support staff?
• How would you rate your overall experience with your customer service representative?
• Was your issue solved within a single session, or did we have to escalate your case?
• Would you prefer to communicate with customer service via phone, email, or live chat?
• How quickly did a customer service representative respond after you contacted us?
• Did you find your wait time to be reasonable?

5. Shipping Survey Questions

A good online experience can be tainted by a bad shipping experience. Make sure the customer’s experience was good from start to finish.

• Did you receive your order within the predicted time frame?
• Would you be interested in receiving products sooner by enrolling in paid services?
• Did the product arrive at the correct address?
• Please rate your overall shipping experience, including any interactions with delivery personnel.
• Was the standard shipping cost reasonable?
• Did you have any difficulty inputting or changing your billing and payment information?
• Did your package arrive undamaged and in good condition?

6. Branding and Marketing Survey Questions

Don’t miss the chance to discover potential follow-up marketing opportunities.

• Would you be interested in signing up for our email newsletter to receive announcements and special discounts?
• Would you like to learn more about our membership benefits?
• We noticed that you checked out as a guest. Would you like to create an account so you can save your order history and preferences?
• Are you interested in enrolling in a paid subscription membership to receive priority services?
• Why did you make a purchase from our company? Please select all that apply: (Need; Brand preference; Supporting a small business; Product quality; Company values; Recommended by a friend; Saw an advertisement; Social media; Other (please specify)
• What made us stand out from the competition?
• Do you follow our brand on social media?

Take on the Future of Ecommerce with Confidence

Now is a good time to establish your ecommerce business. Remember to keep your ears open and always be listening for customer and employee feedback, so you can fine-tune your strategies and create a truly spectacular online experience.

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• Tips & tricks (52)
• Product updates (40)
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70+ Best eCommerce Survey Questions To Grow Your Business in 2024

Author & Editor at ProProfs

Tushar Singh is a UX and product management strategy expert. His MBA in marketing equips him to strategically engage with consumers and enhance the digital landscape.

Looking for the best eCommerce survey questions?

You’re in the right place.

Whether you’re new to website surveys or already have a feedback system in place, the most common challenge is finding the right eCommerce survey question for your campaigns.

If the questions are wrong, the data collected will be inaccurate. But don’t worry!

I have compiled the best research questions about e-commerce you can use for your surveys to get the required information from the customers and make improvements.

I have also shared the best practices you can follow to create your research questions.

What are eCommerce Surveys?

eCommerce surveys are tools used by businesses operating in the online retail space to gather feedback, opinions, and insights from their customers regarding various aspects of their shopping experience.

These surveys are conducted electronically through email, website pop-ups, or integrated into the checkout process.

eCommerce surveys can take various forms, such as multiple-choice questions, rating scales, open-ended questions, and Net Promoter Score (NPS) assessments.

The data collected from these surveys is valuable for informing strategic decisions, improving the customer experience, and driving business growth in a competitive online retail landscape.

70+ E-commerce SurveyQuestions for Better Feedback

I have divided this section into different subcategories to make it more scannable as per your objectives. Each category is based on the customer journey stage or behavior. So once you identify which touchpoints or interactions you want to target, just pick the questions and design your personalized commerce questionnaire survey.

8 Pre-Purchase E-Commerce Survey Questions to Map Preferences

These eCommerce survey questions target visitors at the consideration stage. These include first-time visitors to your product pages, landing pages, and blogs. You can collect data about their preferences, concerns, and fears. It can help you compare what visitors expect to find on your website and what information is there.

Here are some eCommerce survey questions for online shoppers who are yet to make purchase decisions:

• What did you come to this website to do today?
• What did you hope to find on our webpage today?
• What problems are you hoping to solve with our products/services?
• How and when did you first find out about us?

• Does this page meet your expectations?
• What other products/services would you like to see us offer on our webpage?
• Did you find the information you were looking for?
• 404 Error: What were you looking for?

Where to Use them?

• Pages with low conversion-to-traffic ratio.
• You can also pose these questions to people landing on specific landing pages and optimize them.

When to Use them

• If you’re experiencing low conversion rates on your pages.
• When you want to find the appeal of particular products.
• Target first-time visitors to collect leads and demographic data.

Related Read: 30 Best Website Feedback Tools

11 Product Quality Questions for E-commerce Surveys

These eCommerce survey questions help you understand what customer expectations are regarding the quality of your product, to what degree they are happy with it, how they compare your product with your competitors in terms of quality, and more.

Here are some survey questions for your eCommerce website to map product experience:

• How satisfied are you with the product quality?
• What goals does our product help you achieve?
• How would you describe our product based on your experience?
• Which three product features are most valuable to you?
• Do you feel our [product name] is worth the cost?
• How can we make our product better?

• Thanks for buying our product! How do you plan to use it?
• What’s the one feature missing from our product?
• How much do you agree/disagree with the following statement: The [product name] capabilities meet my requirements?
• Please rate the product based on the following traits: quality, value for money, durability, and ease of use.
• What are your main concerns about [product name]?

12 eCommerce Post-Purchase Survey Questions

Once the visitors have passed through the conversion funnel and placed the order, you can use these eCommerce questions to help online shoppers map their shopping experience.

This online shopping survey aims to find the friction points along the shopping journey and weed them out.

Here are some questions to use in your eCommerce survey about online shopping:

• Based on the shopping experience, how likely are you to recommend our product/company to a friend or colleague?
• Please rate your overall shopping experience today.
• Do you receive a notification about the out-of-stock products when it becomes available again?
• How satisfied are you with the product availability on our website/app?
• What other product sizes and colors would you want to see in the future?
• Did you have a hassle-free checkout experience?
• Did we see your preferred payment method at the checkout? If not, please let us know about your preference.
• How would you rate your overall checkout experience?
• What almost prevented you from completing your checkout?
• How would you rate our website speed?
• What is the primary reason for choosing our brand over others?
• How would you rate our product/service on a scale of 0-10?

Where to use them:

• Ideally, the first point of survey deployment should be the order confirmation page, i.e., immediately when the customer completes the purchase.
• If the customer does not fill out the survey, you can retarget them via mail or SMS after 24-48 hours.
• If the purchase was made through your app, send an in-app survey to the customer the next time they use it.

When to use them:

• Pose post-checkout questions to every customer who places an order.
• If you see significant cart abandonment numbers on your website.
• When you’re making changes to the checkout process.

10 Exit Intent-Related E-Commerce Survey Questions

Not all visitors are your ideal customers. But it’s your job to fish out the prospects from the irrelevant bunch and make them stay.

That’s what exit-intent e-commerce customer survey questions do. They help discover why people leave your website without completing the desired action, like clicking on the page CTA or making a purchase.

Once you have the information, you can optimize the page and retarget these visitors to push them into your marketing & sales pipeline. Here are some exit-intent survey questions for the eCommerce website:

Here are some exit-intent survey questions for the eCommerce website:

• Is anything stopping you from signing up at this point?
• Is our product pricing structure clear?
• How can we convince you to sign up for an account?
• Did you encounter anything that doesn’t work as you expected it to?
• Is something preventing you from completing your purchase?
• How can we improve our website and make it more helpful?
• What’s preventing you from starting a trial?
• On this page, it seems like I should be able to…
• What is the primary reason for canceling your account with us?
• Was there anything we could improve about our checkout process?

Try These Exit Intent Survey Templates

• On product pages or landing pages with high bounce rates.
• To retarget returning visitors with products in the cart.
• When people are about to leave the page.
• If the customer has added products to the cart but did not proceed to the checkout.
• When a customer tries canceling a subscription or membership.

12 Service-Related Questions for E-Commerce Surveys

For eCommerce sites, support services form an integral part of the customer experience:

• People might be looking for more information on the product pages.
• Customers might be stuck on the checkout page.
• Some might be facing issues with their account or order.
• There may be a bug.

And when they reach out to you via mail, call, or chat, you need to ensure that the service experience is impeccable.

That’s where service-based eCommerce survey questions come in handy. They let you collect satisfaction ratings, identify problem areas, and gauge your staff’s efficiency

Here are some e-commerce survey questions for gauging service experience:

• Was the service representative able to solve your issues/concerns?
• On a scale of 1-5, how knowledgeable and helpful was our support staff?
• Did our support agent resolve your issue within a single session, or did we have to escalate your case?
• What is your preferred mode of communication with our customer services – phone, live chat, or email?
• Are you satisfied with the response time of the service agent you contacted us?
• Are you satisfied with the order delivery time?
• Did your order arrive at the correct address?
• How would you rate your overall shipping experience?
• What do you think about our shipping cost?
• Did you have any difficulty adding or editing the billing and payment information?
• Did your package arrive undamaged and in good condition?
• Please rate your experience with our support agent.

Where to use them

• Add them to your live chat window after interacting with the visitor.
• Embed them to customers’ support tickets.
• You can also add a service eCommerce survey question to the email signature .
• Send them via mail or SMS to the customer after the interaction.
• Integrate pulse surveys to the phone IVR to collect feedback.
• After sending the first reply to the customer support ticket.
• When you resolve the customers’ issues.
• 24-48 hours after the ticket has been resolved.
• Ask them to rate the service experience right before the customer is about to hang up the call.

Pro tip: You can use customer service like ProProfs Live Chat and ProProfs HelpDesk to offer a solid customer service experience. But it’s also essential to keep measuring how well you’re doing. Surveys that measure such metrics help you with that. Explore this Customer Effort Score guide to know how.

8 Market Research and Branding Questions

These questions are valuable assets when trying to break into a new market, release a new product, or assess a brand’s popularity.

Research-based eCommerce customer survey questions let you map customers’/prospects’ behavior patterns, preferences, delights, and concerns.

When you have this data, you can plug it into different teams like:

• Marketing team to ramp up acquisition efforts.
• Development team to build customer-centric products and optimize the existing products.
• Segment the audience for personalization and ad campaigns.

Here are some market research survey questions for your eCommerce website:

• How did you find our site?
• What search terms did you enter to find our site?
• Would you be interested in our membership benefits?
• Would you like to enroll in our paid subscription membership to get priority services?
• What other options did you consider before choosing our [Product name]?
• Do you follow our company/brand on social media?
• You checked out as a guest recently. Would you be interested in creating an account with us? According to you, what aspects make us stand out from the competition?

• When you’re trying to launch a new product line.
• If you want to reach a new customer segment with your ad campaigns.
• When you want to expand the product to new locations or geographies

11 Product/Website Update-Related Questions

If you have released a product or website update, you need to brace yourself for a barrage of user complaints and suggestions, especially considering the dynamic nature of the e-commerce web design trend.

Not all people would be satisfied with the new UI or UX.

Code conflicts, broken website paths, new UI, and other factors will prompt users to raise concerns, and you need to be ready to deal with them.

The best thing to do is proactively collect feedback using eCommerce UX survey questions.

These are designed to gauge how well the changes fit with your audience, and you can make changes to optimize the website/product.

Let’s look at some product-related eCommerce survey questions:

• Which feature would you like to see in our product?
• What’s your most liked product feature?
• According to you, should we add [feature name] to the [website, app, or product name]?
• If the [product name] became available today, would you purchase it?
• According to you, what should be the ideal product price?
• How would you feel if we discontinued this feature?
• Have you seen any product with [feature name]?
• What problems/issues do you want to solve with our product?
• Based on your experience, how would you rate this new feature?
• Please let us know how we can further impro
• ve this feature.
• Which feature will help to make the product better?

• On pages affected by the new update.
• Send survey mail to people who interacted with the website/product before and after the update.

When to use them

• Build product roadmaps to make the product better.
• Immediately after you release new features.
• Right after the user interacts with the new feature or tab.

Best Practices for Creating eCommerce Surveys

I’ll provide the top 7 best practices for creating effective eCommerce surveys.

• Define Your Goals: Clearly identify what you want to achieve with the survey. Are you aiming to improve customer satisfaction, understand product preferences, gauge brand perception, or gather feedback on specific aspects of your website or checkout process? Having a clear objective will guide your question selection and analysis. Always set SMART goals so that you can focus only on what you’re trying to achieve.

Here’s a short video tutorial on how you can set SMART goals:

• Keep it Short and Sweet : Respect your customers’ time by keeping the survey concise and focused. Aim for 5-10 minutes or less, and prioritize the most essential questions to avoid overwhelming respondents. Long surveys can lead to survey fatigue !
• Ask Clear and Concise Questions: Use straightforward, unambiguous language that everyone can understand. Avoid jargon, technical terms, or leading questions that may bias responses.
• Offer Answer Choices Whenever Possible: Providing options simplifies the survey for respondents and reduces the risk of misinterpretations.

However, leave room for “other” or open-ended responses when appropriate.

• Use Skip and Branching Logic: Tailor the survey flow based on previous answers.

Skip irrelevant questions to personalize the experience and maintain engagement. You can use Qualaroo for this. For instance, if someone didn’t complete a purchase, don’t ask questions about the checkout process.

Also Read: Using Branching or Skip Logic Within a Survey

7. Don’t Forget to Focus on Customers’ Emotions: Understand how customers feel about their experience. With a tool like Qualaroo, you can use its sentiment analysis feature to automatically understand how customers feel about different aspects of your website by looking at the written feedback they give.

Include questions that tap into their emotions and motivations, such as:

• “How likely are you to recommend our products to others?”
• “How satisfied are you with our customer service?”
• “What emotions did you experience while browsing our website?”

Bonus Tip: Test your online shopping survey thoroughly before launching it. Do a pilot test with a small group to identify any confusing questions, unclear instructions, or technical glitches. This ensures a smooth and valuable data collection process.

How to Distribute eCommerce Survey Questions?

Now that you have the repository of the survey questions for your e-commerce website and you know the best practices, let’s see how you can reach out to your audience without annoying them and collect feedback.

It’s all about choosing the right moment and survey method without interrupting their experience.

1. Website Pop-Up

To effectively gather e-commerce survey responses without disrupting the user experience, consider leveraging Qualaroo’s website pop-ups called NudgesTM. Employ pop-ups for desktop users, triggering them after a visitor scrolls through a certain part of the page, and offer incentives like discounts to boost response rates. You can opt for Nudges for mobile web and applications as well. These are less intrusive and can be easily minimized or maximized, making them ideal for collecting feedback across devices. This approach ensures you collect valuable insights while maintaining a positive user experience. The major drawback is that visitors need to close the page before interacting with it again, which takes them out of the website experience.

Best ways to use website pop-ups to ask eCommerce survey questions:

• Use survey targeting options to show pop-up surveys when visitors scroll to a specific page length.
• If you offer a freebie in exchange for survey responses, pop-ups can help improve response rates.
• If you host a mobile app, it’s better to avoid in-app pop-up eCommerce surveys.

2 . Feedback Sidebar or Button

You can attach the entire survey form inside a single tab with the feedback sidebar or button. However, the feedback button is static and lacks triggering options based on users’ on-page behavior. So, what is it suitable for? Collecting unsolicited feedback.

The visitor can click on the sidebar button at any time, respond to the eCommerce survey questions, and submit it. It’s always on the page and makes it easy for people to provide feedback and suggestions.

With emails, you can target off-site visitors with eCommerce survey questions. As for how to attach the survey to the mail, here are a few ways:

• Email link: The email body contains the survey link; the recipient needs to click on the link to go to the survey page and fill it out.
• Embedded survey: When the survey is embedded directly into the mail body. Tools like ProProfs Survey Maker allow respondents to fill out the survey without leaving the email window.
• In-signature survey: When the survey is embedded into the mail signature. It’s perfect for pulse surveys to collect ratings from users.

How to use emails for asking e-commerce survey questions:

• These are best for post-purchase e-commerce customer survey questions to collect insights about the shopping and product experience.
• Send them after the customer contacts support services to ask for their feedback.
• Target long-term customers to collect NPS and CSAT scores.

Maximize ROI With the Right E-Commerce Survey Questions

Online shopping survey can help you understand what customers like and don’t like about your site, which can help you make improvements and improve conversions.

But it would only work if you ask the right questions to the right people.

So, next time you want to create a survey, first identify the target audience and touchpoints. Then, pick the question from our eCommerce survey questions list.

Gathering insights is only half the battle. To use feedback effectively, you need tools like Qualaroo. Using AI techniques like sentiment analysis and word cloud generation, Qualaroo helps analyze eCommerce customer feedback, even parsing through extensive open-ended responses.

By employing these insights effectively, you can fine-tune your website, app, and product to perfection.

So, are you ready to take the first step?

Unlock the full potential of your eCommerce business! Sign up for a free trial or request a demo with Qualaroo today.

About the author

Tushar Singh

Tushar has 1.5 years of experience in content creation. He is passionate about behavioral science and has a deep understanding of how organizations can leverage user research and customer support for maximum success. In his free time, he enjoys playing video games, fulfilling his curiosity about the universe and reading World War Memoirs.

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Online purchasing survey questions + Sample questionnaire template

Online purchasing survey template is a demographic survey template that consists of 15 plus questions related to online purchasing behavior of consumers. This sample survey template has questions that ask about the internet retailer from which buyers prefer to make regular purchases and why. This questionnaire has systematic answer options from which respondents can choose from and best indicate online purchasing habits.

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Related templates and questionnaires

Apparel shopping lifestyle survey template, general shopping demographics survey template, life attitudes survey template.

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Market research questions: what to ask and how.

9 min read Whether you’re looking for customer feedback, product suggestions or brand perception in the market, the right market research questions can help you get the best insights. Learn how you can use them correctly and where to begin.

What is market research?

Market research (also called marketing research) is the action or activity of gathering information about market needs and preferences. This helps companies understand their target market — how the audience feels and behaves.

For example, this could be an online questionnaire , shared by email, which has a set of questions that ask an audience about their views. For an audience of target customers, your questions may explore their reaction to a new product that can be used as feedback into the design.

Why do market research?

When you have tangible insights on the audience’s needs, you can then take steps to meet those needs and solve problems. This mitigates the risk of an experience gap – which is what your audience expects you deliver versus what you actually deliver.

In doing this work, you can gain:

• Improved purchase levels – Sales will improve if your product or service is ticking all the right buttons for your customers.
• Improved decision making – You can avoid the risk of losing capital or time by using what your research tells you and acting with insights.
• Real connection with your target market – If you’re investing in understanding your target audience, your product and service will more likely to make an impact.
• Understand new opportunities – it might be that your research indicates a new area for your product to play within, or you find potential for a new service that wasn’t considered before.

Get started with our free survey maker

Who do you ask your questions to?

Who to target in your market research is crucial to getting the right insights and data back. If you don’t have a firm idea on who your target audiences are, then here are some questions that you can ask before you begin writing your market research questions:

• Who is our customer currently and who do we want to attract in the future?
• How do they behave with your brand?
• What do they say, do and think?
• What are their pain points, needs and wants?
• Where do they live? What is the size of our market?
• Why do they use us? Why do they use other brands?

We’ve put together some questions below (Market research questions for your demographics) if you wanted to reach out to your market for this.

With the answers, you can help you segment your customer market, understand key consumer trends , create customer personas and discover the right way to target them.

Market research goals

Give yourself the right direction to work towards.There are different kinds of market research that can happen, but to choose the right market research questions, figure out your market research goals first.

Set a SMART goal that thinks about what you want to achieve and keeps you on track. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. For example, a good SMART business goal would be to increase website sales for a top product by 10% over a period of 6 months.

You may need to review some strategic business information, like customer personas and historical sales data, which can give you the foundation of knowledge (the ‘baseline’) to grow from. This, combined with your business objectives, will help you form the right SMART targets tailored to your teams.

Types of market research questions

Now that you have your SMART target, you can look at which type of market research questions will help you reach your goal. They can be split into these types:

• For demographics
• For customers
• For product

Market research questions for your demographics

Demographic information about your customers is data about gender, age, ethnicity, annual income, education and marital status. It also gives key information about their shopping habits.

Here are some questions you can ask in your market research survey:

• What is your age / gender / ethnicity / marital status?
• What is the highest level of education you have achieved?
• What is your monthly income range?
• What methods of shopping do you use?
• What amount do you spend on [product/brand/shopping] each month?
• How regular do you shop for [product/brand]?

Learn more about the demographic survey questions that yield valuable insights .

Market research questions for your customer

These questions are aimed at your customer to understand the voice of the customer — the customer marketing landscape is not an one-way dialogue for engaging prospects and your customer’s feedback is needed for the development of your products or services.

• How did we do / would you rate us?
• Why did you decide to use [product or service]?
• How does that fit your needs?
• Would you recommend us to your friends?
• Would you buy from us again?
• What could we do better?
• Why did you decide to shop elsewhere?
• In your opinion, why should customers choose us?
• How would you rate our customer experience?

Learn more about why the voice of the customer matters or try running a customer experience survey.

Market research questions for your product

These questions will help you understand how your customers perceive your product, their reactions to it and whether changes need to be made in the development cycle.

• What does our [product or service] do that you like or dislike?
• What do you think about [feature or benefit]?
• How does the product help you solve your problems?
• Which of these features will be the most valuable / useful for you?
• Is our product competitive with other similar products out there? How?
• How does the product score on [cost / service / ease of use, etc.]?
• What changes will customers likely want in the future that technology can provide?

There are also a set of questions you can ask to find out if your product pricing is set at the right mark:

• Does the product value justify the price it’s marketed at?
• Is the pricing set at the right mark?
• How much would you pay for this product?
• Is this similar to what competitors are charging?
• Do you believe the price is fair?
• Do you believe the pricing is right based on the amount of usage you’d get?

Have you tried a pricing and value research survey to see how much your target customers would be willing to pay?

Market research questions for your brand

How does the impact of your products, services and experiences impact your brand’s image? You can find out using these questions:

• What do you think about our brand?
• Have you seen any reviews about us online? What do they say?
• Have you heard about our brand from friends or family? What do they say?
• How likely are you to recommend our brand to a friend?
• Have you read the testimonials on our own channels? Did they have an impact on your decision to purchase? How?
• When you think of our brand, what do you think/ feel / want?
• How did you hear about us?
• Do you feel confident you know what our brand stands for?
• Are you aware of our [channel] account?

Learn more about brand perception surveys and how to carry them out successfully.

How to use market research questions in a survey

For the best research questionnaires, tailoring your market research questions to the goal you want will help you focus the direction of the data received.

You can get started now on your own market research questionnaire, using one of our free survey templates, when you sign up to a free Qualtrics account.

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With Qualtrics, you can distribute, and analyse surveys to find customer, employee, brand, product, and marketing research insights.

More than 11,000 brands and 99 of the top 100 business schools use Qualtrics solutions because of the freedom and power it gives them.

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Related resources

Market intelligence 10 min read, marketing insights 11 min read, ethnographic research 11 min read, qualitative vs quantitative research 13 min read, qualitative research questions 11 min read, qualitative research design 12 min read, primary vs secondary research 14 min read, request demo.

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16 Consumer behavior survey questions for expert customer insights

16 consumer behavior survey questions to ask your customers, use consumer insights to your advantage: best practices, make customer data analysis easy with attest.

Most consumers don’t realize the patterns in their purchasing habits. We don’t know (or want to know) just how impulsive we really are. Unprompted, we don’t think all too much about what or who influences our buying (apart from when you’re sure Instagram is listening to you and you get creepily well-targeted ads).

But as a business, knowing all about consumer behavior is incredibly valuable. You’ll be one step ahead every time, ready to delight consumers—and ideally turn them into fans who’ll rave about you to their friends and family.

One way to find out what consumer behavior is most relevant to your business is with a consumer behavior questionnaire. And we’re here to help you create a great one.

A consumer behavior survey is a type of market research that helps you gather information on consumer attitudes, preferences, and behaviors.

These insights allow you to tailor your products, services, strategies and marketing to your customers’ needs to increase sales, customer satisfaction and gain a competitive edge.

Here we’ll give you 16 questions to include in your next market research.

Let’s get to know your customers, shall we?

If you’re looking to gather data about purchase behavior using online surveys, you’ll want to use a mix of close-ended and open-ended questions. This mix of survey questions enables you to gather reliable consumer insights through tangible data (through closed-ended questions), and provides context for why your potential customers do things in certain ways (through open-ended questions).

Using our Customer Research Team’s vast experience helping brands carry out reliable consumer behavior market research, we’ve gathered these example questions.

It’s important to note that this is not a copy-paste survey: you should be creating one that is specific to your research goals and business. These questions merely serve as inspiration.

Here’s a brief rundown of the behavior questions we’ll cover in this guide:

• How often do you purchase [PRODUCT]?
• What factors influence your decision to purchase [PRODUCT]?
• What channels do you typically use to learn about this [PRODUCT]?
• What is your preferred method of payment for [PRODUCT]?
• How do you prefer to interact with [BRAND]?
• What is your main reason for using [PRODUCT]?
• What is the most important factor when considering whether to purchase [PRODUCT]?
• How did you first learn about [BRAND/PRODUCT]?
• How much time do you spend researching [PRODUCT] before making a purchase?
• What factors influence your decision to abandon an online shopping cart?
• How important is sustainability or ethical sourcing when making a purchasing decision?
• What is your preferred delivery method for [PRODUCT]?
• Who do you consult when making a purchase decision for [product]?
• Which of the following best describes how you’re spending money at the moment?
• What are some factors that would cause you to switch from one brand to another?
• How do you typically find information for [PRODUCT]?

And with that, let’s dive into the most insightful survey questions .

1. How often do you purchase [PRODUCT]?

How often do your target consumers embark on the customer journey? Knowing the frequency of their purchases can help you identify trends and adjust your marketing strategies accordingly.

You might discover that people buy your products on a more seasonal basis. This could open up the possibility of offering alternative products that might fill in the seasonal gaps, giving your brand a more comprehensive, year-round market share.

And you can follow up with questions to find out when these purchases are made and how much time people take for their research before they buy, to plan your time to shine.

2. What factors influence your decision to purchase [PRODUCT]?

Knowing the factors that have an effect on what brand people choose is super valuable info! It’s the type of data that can help you make it past the consideration stage.

It helps you focus your marketing messages and position your product in the best way possible. It can also reveal areas in which your brand can differentiate itself.

3. What channels do you typically use to learn about this [PRODUCT]?

Knowing how people learn about products can help you determine which channels are most effective in reaching your target audience. This intel can give clear direction to your marketing team and sales strategies.

Learn how customers make buying decisions

Get data into how your customers behave—and buy!—with Attest’s Jobs to be Done survey template, written by research experts.

4. What is your preferred method of payment for [PRODUCT]?

It might seem an odd question to ask: if people love your product, does the payment method really matter?

Well it does—if you want to provide an excellent customer experience and increase conversions.

Optimizing your payment processes can elevate your company and brand experience and make you the preferred vendor.

Learn more about how to test consumer preferences.

5. How do you prefer to interact with [BRAND]?

It’s unlikely that people like ‘speaking’ to bots who don’t seem to truly understand them.

When building a customer service strategy, turn to your customers to find out how they prefer to communicate, so that you can optimize your channels.

Share this information with your customer support team to help them understand the needs of customers even better.

6. What is your main reason for using [PRODUCT]?

This question will help you understand the market and primary use case for your specific product here.

This information helps you tailor your messaging and promotions to specific customer segments.

7. What is the most important factor when considering whether to purchase [PRODUCT]?

If you’ve already identified the list of factors, you can narrow it down and find which one is the most important one.

This helps you make key decisions about branding, product placement, pricing and more.

8. How did you first learn about [BRAND/PRODUCT]?

It’s not just about the last push to the purchase decision. The first encounter tells you just as much—if not more. It gives you vital information on how you can reach more potential customers in the awareness stage, and build your brand in their minds.

With this data you can identify effective marketing channels and increase brand awareness which leads to more conversions.

9. How much time do you spend researching [PRODUCT] before making a purchase?

Some people are impulse buyers, others roam the web for weeks before clicking ‘Pay Now’.

Finding out what is most common in specific segments that are relevant to you can help you create better content that addresses common questions and concerns.

10. What factors influence your decision to abandon an online shopping cart?

Is it unexpected shipping costs? Delivery times that are too long? Or were they just window shopping?

With this data you can reduce cart abandonment rates and optimize the user experience.

11. How important is sustainability or ethical sourcing when making a purchasing decision?

Ideally, we all keep this in mind when buying any product. But in certain segments, there will likely be more or less focus on this.

Finding out which ones these are can help you optimize your messaging and targeting. This is an important type of question to ask when creating a customer profile too.

12. What is your preferred delivery method for [PRODUCT]?

Much like payment options and customer service, product delivery is all about creating a seamless customer experience. Ideally your customers should barely notice that your product was delivered at all—it should be a smooth and hassle-free process.

Knowing your customers’ preferred delivery methods can help you optimize your distribution channels and reduce delivery-related friction points.

13. Who do you consult when making a purchase decision for [product]?

Even though we usually buy stuff ‘alone’, we don’t always go through the process of buying alone. We evaluate what others are saying, whether it’s from reviews, influencers’ social streams or advice from a family member—there’s a lot to take in.

Knowing who weighs in is crucial, because you will want to influence and educate those people too.

14. Which of the following best describes how you’re spending money at the moment?

Understanding how people pay for your product or service only tells you so much about their approach to money.

There are tons of external factors that affect spending, so finding out how people feel at any given time can give you an indication of how likely they are to part with their cash. It makes sense to track things like this over time to make sure you’re on the ball when the market shifts.

15. What are some factors that would cause you to switch from one brand to another?

Identifying factors that can cause customer churn is what informs strong loyalty strategies, keeping customers happy, engaged and buying!

Knowing why they choose your brand is vital—and so is understanding why they go elsewhere.

16. How do you typically find information for [PRODUCT]?

It’s not just Google anymore. Find out if people are learning about products like yours on alternative channels such as Reddit, TikTok, LinkedIn or other platforms to make sure you are represented in the right places.

And don’t forget the importance of word of mouth! In study after study we see that consumers place massive trust in their friends and family to give them good product and service recommendations.

You might struggle to see how you can learn about behaviors from the data coming out of a survey. No need to stress: here are some tips to make your data more actionable and valuable to your team.

• Look for the patterns: Look for patterns in the data such as common responses from specific demographics, or shifting trends over time. These patterns give valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences.
• Don’t ignore outliers: Look for outliers too that may represent extreme or unusual consumer perceptions or responses. Even though they’re not the most common ones, they are still valuable. They can give you insights into customer preferences that may not be immediately apparent from what ‘the average’ tells you.
• Use an all-in-one survey tool: ideally, you collect and analyze data all in the same consumer insight software. This minimizes the risk of errors caused by data transfers and keeps your data safe. Choosing a tool like Attest means you get everything you need for your market research from start to finish, including your very own research expert to give you guidance along the way.
• Compare and contrast: Compare and contrast the responses to different questions. For example, compare responses to questions about product features, quality and price to understand the trade-offs that customers make when making purchasing decisions. Are answers in line with each other? Or can you spot some discrepancies?
• Compare to industry benchmarks: Compare your survey data to industry benchmarks and assumptions you had before to get a sense of how the business is performing relative to competitors. Put things in perspective, but keep it relevant to your business. You’re not trying to just fit in, you want to stand out!

Running consumer behavior surveys is simple, using Attest. We provide you with everything you need to learn about the moves, motives and motivations of your target audience. Your dedicated research expert will help you to get the best insights from your data so you can greatly benefit from consumer profiling . See our consumer profiling survey template for further ideas.

Get reliable consumer behavior insights

Make sure you gather consumer insights that are genuinely useful with our survey templates—written by our experts in the Customer Research Team

Elliot Barnard

Customer Research Lead 

Elliot joined Attest in 2019 and has dedicated his career to working with brands carrying out market research. At Attest Elliot takes a leading role in the Customer Research Team, to support customers as they uncover insights and new areas for growth.

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A study on factors limiting online shopping behaviour of consumers

Rajagiri Management Journal

ISSN : 0972-9968

Article publication date: 4 March 2021

Issue publication date: 12 April 2021

This study aims to investigate consumer behaviour towards online shopping, which further examines various factors limiting consumers for online shopping behaviour. The purpose of the research was to find out the problems that consumers face during their shopping through online stores.

Design/methodology/approach

A quantitative research method was adopted for this research in which a survey was conducted among the users of online shopping sites.

As per the results total six factors came out from the study that restrains consumers to buy from online sites – fear of bank transaction and faith, traditional shopping more convenient than online shopping, reputation and services provided, experience, insecurity and insufficient product information and lack of trust.

Research limitations/implications

This study is beneficial for e-tailers involved in e-commerce activities that may be customer-to-customer or customer-to-the business. Managerial implications are suggested for improving marketing strategies for generating consumer trust in online shopping.

Originality/value

In contrast to previous research, this study aims to focus on identifying those factors that restrict consumers from online shopping.

• Online shopping

Daroch, B. , Nagrath, G. and Gupta, A. (2021), "A study on factors limiting online shopping behaviour of consumers", Rajagiri Management Journal , Vol. 15 No. 1, pp. 39-52. https://doi.org/10.1108/RAMJ-07-2020-0038

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2020, Bindia Daroch, Gitika Nagrath and Ashutosh Gupta.

Published in Rajagiri Management Journal . Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

Introduction

Today, people are living in the digital environment. Earlier, internet was used as the source for information sharing, but now life is somewhat impossible without it. Everything is linked with the World Wide Web, whether it is business, social interaction or shopping. Moreover, the changed lifestyle of individuals has changed their way of doing things from traditional to the digital way in which shopping is also being shifted to online shopping.

Online shopping is the process of purchasing goods directly from a seller without any intermediary, or it can be referred to as the activity of buying and selling goods over the internet. Online shopping deals provide the customer with a variety of products and services, wherein customers can compare them with deals of other intermediaries also and choose one of the best deals for them ( Sivanesan, 2017 ).

As per Statista-The Statistics Portal, the digital population worldwide as of April 2020 is almost 4.57 billion people who are active internet users, and 3.81 billion are social media users. In terms of internet usage, China, India and the USA are ahead of all other countries ( Clement, 2020 ).

The number of consumers buying online and the amount of time people spend online has risen ( Monsuwe et al. , 2004 ). It has become more popular among customers to buy online, as it is handier and time-saving ( Huseynov and Yildirim, 2016 ; Mittal, 2013 ). Convenience, fun and quickness are the prominent factors that have increased the consumer’s interest in online shopping ( Lennon et al. , 2008 ). Moreover, busy lifestyles and long working hours also make online shopping a convenient and time-saving solution over traditional shopping. Consumers have the comfort of shopping from home, reduced traveling time and cost and easy payment ( Akroush and Al-Debei, 2015 ). Furthermore, price comparisons can be easily done while shopping through online mode ( Aziz and Wahid, 2018 ; Martin et al. , 2015 ). According to another study, the main influencing factors for online shopping are availability, low prices, promotions, comparisons, customer service, user friendly, time and variety to choose from ( Jadhav and Khanna, 2016 ). Moreover, website design and features also encourage shoppers to shop on a particular website that excite them to make the purchase.

Online retailers have started giving plenty of offers that have increased the online traffic to much extent. Regularly online giants like Amazon, Flipkart, AliExpress, etc. are advertising huge discounts and offers that are luring a large number of customers to shop from their websites. Companies like Nykaa, MakeMyTrip, Snapdeal, Jabong, etc. are offering attractive promotional deals that are enticing the customers.

Despite so many advantages, some customers may feel online shopping risky and not trustworthy. The research proposed that there is a strong relationship between trust and loyalty, and most often, customers trust brands far more than a retailer selling that brand ( Bilgihan, 2016 ; Chaturvedi et al. , 2016 ). In the case of online shopping, there is no face-to-face interaction between seller and buyer, which makes it non-socialize, and the buyer is sometimes unable to develop the trust ( George et al. , 2015 ). Trust in the e-commerce retailer is crucial to convert potential customer to actual customer. However, the internet provides unlimited products and services, but along with those unlimited services, there is perceived risk in digital shopping such as mobile application shopping, catalogue or mail order ( Tsiakis, 2012 ; Forsythe et al. , 2006 ; Aziz and Wahid, 2018 ).

Literature review

A marketer has to look for different approaches to sell their products and in the current scenario, e-commerce has become the popular way of selling the goods. Whether it is durable or non-durable, everything is available from A to Z on websites. Some websites are specifically designed for specific product categories only, and some are selling everything.

The prominent factors like detailed information, comfort and relaxed shopping, less time consumption and easy price comparison influence consumers towards online shopping ( Agift et al. , 2014 ). Furthermore, factors like variety, quick service and discounted prices, feedback from previous customers make customers prefer online shopping over traditional shopping ( Jayasubramanian et al. , 2015 ). It is more preferred by youth, as during festival and holiday season online retailers give ample offers and discounts, which increases the online traffic to a great extent ( Karthikeyan, 2016 ). Moreover, services like free shipping, cash on delivery, exchange and returns are also luring customers towards online purchases.

More and more people are preferring online shopping over traditional shopping because of their ease and comfort. A customer may have both positive and negative experiences while using an online medium for their purchase. Some of the past studies have shown that although there are so many benefits still some customers do not prefer online as their basic medium of shopping.

While making online purchase, customers cannot see, touch, feel, smell or try the products that they want to purchase ( Katawetawaraks and Wang, 2011 ; Al-Debei et al. , 2015 ), due to which product is difficult to examine, and it becomes hard for customers to make purchase decision. In addition, some products are required to be tried like apparels and shoes, but in case of online shopping, it is not possible to examine and feel the goods and assess its quality before making a purchase due to which customers are hesitant to buy ( Katawetawaraks and Wang, 2011 ; Comegys et al. , 2009 ). Alam and Elaasi (2016) in their study found product quality is the main factor, which worries consumer to make online purchase. Moreover, some customers have reported fake products and imitated items in their delivered orders ( Jun and Jaafar, 2011 ). A low quality of merchandise never generates consumer trust on online vendor. A consumer’s lack of trust on the online vendor is the most common reason to avoid e-commerce transactions ( Lee and Turban, 2001 ). Fear of online theft and non-reliability is another reason to escape from online shopping ( Karthikeyan, 2016 ). Likewise, there is a risk of incorrect information on the website, which may lead to a wrong purchase, or in some cases, the information is incomplete for the customer to make a purchase decision ( Liu and Guo, 2008 ). Moreover, in some cases, the return and exchange policies are also not clear on the website. According to Wei et al. (2010) , the reliability and credibility of e-retailer have direct impact on consumer decision with regards to online shopping.

Limbu et al. (2011) revealed that when it comes to online retailers, some websites provide very little information about their companies and sellers, due to which consumers feel insecure to purchase from these sites. According to other research, consumers are hesitant, due to scams and feel anxious to share their personal information with online vendors ( Miyazaki and Fernandez, 2001 ; Limbu et al. , 2011 ). Online buyers expect websites to provide secure payment and maintain privacy. Consumers avoid online purchases because of the various risks involved with it and do not find internet shopping secured ( Cheung and Lee, 2003 ; George et al. , 2015 ; Banerjee et al. , 2010 ). Consumers perceive the internet as an unsecured channel to share their personal information like emails, phone and mailing address, debit card or credit card numbers, etc. because of the possibility of misuse of that information by other vendors or any other person ( Lim and Yazdanifard, 2014 ; Kumar, 2016 ; Alam and Yasin, 2010 ; Nazir et al. , 2012 ). Some sites make it vital and important to share personal details of shoppers before shopping, due to which people abandon their shopping carts (Yazdanifard and Godwin, 2011). About 75% of online shoppers leave their shopping carts before they make their final decision to purchase or sometimes just before making the payments ( Cho et al. , 2006 ; Gong et al. , 2013 ).

Moreover, some of the customers who have used online shopping confronted with issues like damaged products and fake deliveries, delivery problems or products not received ( Karthikeyan, 2016 ; Kuriachan, 2014 ). Sometimes consumers face problems while making the return or exchange the product that they have purchased from online vendors ( Liang and Lai, 2002 ), as some sites gave an option of picking from where it was delivered, but some online retailers do not give such services to consumer and consumer him/herself has to courier the product for return or exchange, which becomes inopportune. Furthermore, shoppers had also faced issues with unnecessary delays ( Muthumani et al. , 2017 ). Sometimes, slow websites, improper navigations or fear of viruses may drop the customer’s willingness to purchase from online stores ( Katawetawaraks and Wang, 2011 ). As per an empirical study done by Liang and Lai (2002) , design of the e-store or website navigation has an impact on the purchase decision of the consumer. An online shopping experience that a consumer may have and consumer skills that consumers may use while purchasing such as website knowledge, product knowledge or functioning of online shopping influences consumer behaviour ( Laudon and Traver, 2009 ).

From the various findings and viewpoints of the previous researchers, the present study identifies the complications online shoppers face during online transactions, as shown in Figure 1 . Consumers do not have faith, and there is lack of confidence on online retailers due to incomplete information on website related to product and service, which they wish to purchase. Buyers are hesitant due to fear of online theft of their personal and financial information, which makes them feel there will be insecure transaction and uncertain errors may occur while making online payment. Some shoppers are reluctant due to the little internet knowledge. Furthermore, as per the study done by Nikhashem et al. (2011), consumers unwilling to use internet for their shopping prefer traditional mode of shopping, as it gives roaming experience and involves outgoing activity.

Several studies have been conducted earlier that identify the factors influencing consumer towards online shopping but few have concluded the factors that restricts the consumers from online shopping. The current study is concerned with the factors that may lead to hesitation by the customer to purchase from e-retailers. This knowledge will be useful for online retailers to develop customer driven strategies and to add more value product and services and further will change their ways of promoting and advertising the goods and enhance services for customers.

Research methodology

This study aimed to find out the problems that are generally faced by a customer during online purchase and the relevant factors due to which customers do not prefer online shopping. Descriptive research design has been used for the study. Descriptive research studies are those that are concerned with describing the characteristics of a particular individual or group. This study targets the population drawn from customers who have purchased from online stores. Most of the respondents participated were post graduate students and and educators. The total population size was indefinite and the sample size used for the study was 158. A total of 170 questionnaires were distributed among various online users, out of which 12 questionnaires were received with incomplete responses and were excluded from the analysis. The respondents were selected based on the convenient sampling technique. The primary data were collected from Surveys with the help of self-administered questionnaires. The close-ended questionnaire was used for data collection so as to reduce the non-response rate and errors. The questionnaire consists of two different sections, in which the first section consists of the introductory questions that gives the details of socio-economic profile of the consumers as well as their behaviour towards usage of internet, time spent on the Web, shopping sites preferred while making the purchase, and the second section consist of the questions related to the research question. To investigate the factors restraining consumer purchase, five-point Likert scale with response ranges from “Strongly agree” to “Strongly disagree”, with following equivalencies, “strongly disagree” = 1, “disagree” = 2, “neutral” = 3, “agree” = 4 and “strongly agree” = 5 was used in the questionnaire with total of 28 items. After collecting the data, it was manually recorded on the Excel sheet. For analysis socio-economic profile descriptive statistics was used and factors analysis was performed on SPSS for factor reduction.

Data analysis and interpretation

The primary data collected from the questionnaires was completely quantified and analysed by using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 20. This statistical program enables accuracy and makes it relatively easy to interpret data. A descriptive and inferential analysis was performed. Table 1 represents the results of socio-economic status of the respondents along with some introductory questions related to usage of internet, shopping sites used by the respondents, amount of money spent by the respondents and products mostly purchased through online shopping sites.

According to the results, most (68.4%) of the respondents were belonging to the age between 21 and 30 years followed by respondents who were below the age of 20 years (16.4%) and the elderly people above 50 were very few (2.6%) only. Most of the respondents who participated in the study were females (65.8)% who shop online as compared to males (34.2%). The respondents who participated in the study were students (71.5%), and some of them were private as well as government employees. As per the results, most (50.5%) of the people having income below INR15,000 per month who spend on e-commerce websites. The results also showed that most of the respondents (30.9%) spent less than 5 h per week on internet, but up to (30.3%) spend 6–10 h per week on internet either on online shopping or social media. Majority (97.5%) of them have shopped through online websites and had both positive and negative experiences, whereas 38% of the people shopped 2–5 times and 36.7% shopped more than ten times. Very few people (12%), shopped only once. Most of the respondents spent between INR1,000–INR5,000 for online shopping, and few have spent more than INR5,000 also.

As per the results, the most visited online shopping sites was amazon.com (71.5%), followed by flipkart.com (53.2%). Few respondents have also visited other e-commerce sites like eBay, makemytrip.com and myntra.com. Most (46.2%) of the time people purchase apparels followed by electronics and daily need items from the ecommerce platform. Some of the respondents have purchased books as well as cosmetics, and some were preferring online sites for travel tickets, movie tickets, hotel bookings and payments also.

Factor analysis

To explore the factors that restrict consumers from using e-commerce websites factor analysis was done, as shown in Table 3 . A total of 28 items were used to find out the factors that may restrain consumers to buy from online shopping sites, and the results were six factors. The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) measure, as shown in Table 2 , in this study was 0.862 (>0.60), which states that values are adequate, and factor analysis can be proceeded. The Bartlett’s test of sphericity is related to the significance of the study and the significant value is 0.000 (<0.05) as shown in Table 2 .

The analysis produced six factors with eigenvalue more than 1, and factor loadings that exceeded 0.30. Moreover, reliability test of the scale was performed through Cronbach’s α test. The range of Cronbach’s α test came out to be between 0.747 and 0.825, as shown in Table 3 , which means ( α > 0.7) the high level of internal consistency of the items used in survey ( Table 4 ).

Factor 1 – The results revealed that the “fear of bank transaction and faith” was the most significant factor, with 29.431% of the total variance and higher eigenvalue, i.e. 8.241. The six statements loaded on Factor 1 highly correlate with each other. The analysis shows that some people do not prefer online shopping because they are scared to pay online through credit or debit cards, and they do not have faith over online vendors.

Factor 2 – “Traditional shopping is convenient than online shopping” has emerged as a second factor which explicates 9.958% of total variance. It has five statements and clearly specifies that most of the people prefer traditional shopping than online shopping because online shopping is complex and time-consuming.

Factor 3 – Third crucial factor emerged in the factor analysis was “reputation and service provided”. It was found that 7.013% of variations described for the factor. Five statements have been found on this factor, all of which were interlinked. It clearly depicts that people only buy from reputed online stores after comparing prices and who provide guarantee or warrantee on goods.

Factor 4 – “Experience” was another vital factor, with 4.640% of the total variance. It has three statements that clearly specifies that people do not go for online shopping due to lack of knowledge and their past experience was not good and some online stores do not provide EMI facilities.

Factor 5 – Fifth important factor arisen in the factor analysis was “Insecurity and Insufficient Product Information” with 4.251% of the total variance, and it has laden five statements, which were closely intertwined. This factor explored that online shopping is not secure as traditional shopping. The information of products provided on online stores is not sufficient to make the buying decision.

Factor 6 – “Lack of trust” occurred as the last factor of the study, which clarifies 3.920% of the total variance. It has four statements that clearly state that some people hesitate to give their personal information, as they believe online shopping is risky than traditional shopping. Without touching the product, people hesitate to shop from online stores.

The study aimed to determine the problems faced by consumers during online purchase. The result showed that most of the respondents have both positive and negative experience while shopping online. There were many problems or issues that consumer’s face while using e-commerce platform. Total six factors came out from the study that limits consumers to buy from online sites like fear of bank transaction and no faith, traditional shopping more convenient than online shopping, reputation and services provided, experience, insecurity and insufficient product information and lack of trust.

The research might be useful for the e-tailers to plan out future strategies so as to serve customer as per their needs and generate customer loyalty. As per the investigation done by Casalo et al. (2008) , there is strong relationship between reputation and satisfaction, which further is linked to customer loyalty. If the online retailer has built his brand name, or image of the company, the customer is more likely to prefer that retailer as compared to new entrant. The online retailer that seeks less information from customers are more preferred as compared to those require complete personal information ( Lawler, 2003 ).

Online retailers can adopt various strategies to persuade those who hesitate to shop online such that retailer need to find those negative aspects to solve the problems of customers so that non-online shopper or irregular online consumer may become regular customer. An online vendor has to pay attention to product quality, variety, design and brands they are offering. Firstly, the retailer must enhance product quality so as to generate consumer trust. For this, they can provide complete seller information and history of the seller, which will preferably enhance consumer trust towards that seller.

Furthermore, they can adopt marketing strategies such as user-friendly and secure website, which can enhance customers’ shopping experience and easy product search and proper navigation system on website. Moreover, complete product and service information such as feature and usage information, description and dimensions of items can help consumer decide which product to purchase. The experience can be enhanced by adding more pictures, product videos and three-dimensional (3D), images which will further help consumer in the decision-making process. Moreover, user-friendly payment systems like cash on deliveries, return and exchange facilities as per customer needs, fast and speedy deliveries, etc. ( Chaturvedi et al. , 2016 ; Muthumani et al. , 2017 ) will also enhance the probability of purchase from e-commerce platform. Customers are concerned about not sharing their financial details on any website ( Roman, 2007 ; Limbu et al. , 2011 ). Online retailers can ensure payment security by offering numerous payment options such as cash on delivery, delivery after inspection, Google Pay or Paytm or other payment gateways, etc. so as to increase consumer trust towards website, and customer will not hesitate for financial transaction during shopping. Customers can trust any website depending upon its privacy policy, so retailers can provide customers with transparent security policy, privacy policy and secure transaction server so that customers will not feel anxious while making online payments ( Pan and Zinkhan, 2006 ). Moreover, customers not only purchase basic goods from the online stores but also heed augmented level of goods. Therefore, if vendors can provide quick and necessary support, answer all their queries within 24-hour service availability, customers may find it convenient to buy from those websites ( Martin et al. , 2015 ). Sellers must ensure to provide products and services that are suitable for internet. Retailers can consider risk lessening strategies such as easy return and exchange policies to influence consumers ( Bianchi and Andrews, 2012 ). Furthermore, sellers can offer after-sales services as given by traditional shoppers to attract more customers and generate unique shopping experience.

Although nowadays, most of the vendors do give plenty of offers in form of discounts, gifts and cashbacks, but most of them are as per the needs of e-retailers and not customers. Beside this, trust needs to be generated in the customer’s mind, which can be done by modifying privacy and security policies. By adopting such practices, the marketer can generate customers’ interest towards online shopping.

Conceptual framework of the study

Socioeconomic status of respondents

KMO and Bartlett’s test

Cronbach’s α

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Further reading

Grabner-Kräuter , S. and Kaluscha , E.A. ( 2003 ), “ Empirical research in on-line trust: a review and critical assessment ”, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies , Vol. 58 No. 6 , pp. 783 - 812 .

Nurfajrinah , M.A. , Nurhadi , Z.F. and Ramdhani , M.A. ( 2017 ), “ Meaning of online shopping for indie model ”, The Social Sciences , Vol. 12 No. 4 , pp. 737 - 742 , available at: https://medwelljournals.com/abstract/?doi=sscience.2017.737.742

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• 1. Online shopping and purchasing preferences

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America has long been a nation of shoppers, and that is as true online as it is in the physical world. The earliest modern e-commerce transactions date to just 1994, but by 2015 Americans were spending nearly $350 billion annually online – or roughly 10% of all retail purchases, excluding automobiles and fuel. Pew Research Center surveys of digital commerce tell a similar tale. When the Center first asked about online shopping in a survey conducted in June 2000, just 22% of Americans indicated that they had ever made a purchase online. But in the intervening years that figure has increased nearly fourfold: Today, 79% of Americans say they make purchases online.

And in an era of widespread social media use and smartphone access, many Americans are incorporating these devices and platforms into their purchasing behaviors. Roughly half (51%) of Americans report making online purchases using their cellphones, while 15% have purchased something by following a link on social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter.

A substantial majority of Americans are online shoppers, but for most this behavior is a relatively infrequent occurrence. Some 15% of Americans say that they make purchases online on a weekly basis (4% do so several times a week, while 10% do so about once a week) and 28% shop online a few times a month. On the other hand, nearly six-in-ten Americans say they buy online less often than a few times a month (37%) or they never make any online purchases (20%).

And while each of these online shopping behaviors are relatively common across a wide range of demographic groups, younger adults in particular are especially likely to utilize cellphones and social media platforms to engage in commercial activity. Some 90% of 18- to 29-year-olds ever buy items online, while 77% have purchased something using their cellphones and 24% have bought something by following a link on social media. By contrast, a majority (59%) of those 65 and older ever generally make online purchases–but only 17% have bought something using their cellphones and just 5% have done so through a social media link.

Two-thirds of online shoppers generally prefer buying from physical stores, although pricing differences are ultimately what drives most Americans’ purchasing decisions

Despite the large share of Americans who engage in online shopping and the potential conveniences that come with buying online, a majority of online shoppers indicate that – all things being equal – they actually prefer to do their shopping in physical stores. Some 65% of online shoppers indicate that, when given the choice, they generally prefer to buy from physical locations; 34% indicate that they generally prefer to buy online.

As might be expected, the most dedicated online shoppers tend to express a relatively pronounced preference for shopping online as opposed to shopping in physical stores. Among Americans who make online purchases on a weekly basis, 62% indicate that they generally prefer to buy online, while 37% generally prefer to buy from physical stores. But among those who buy online on a monthly basis, 42% prefer online shopping while 58% prefer buying from physical locations. And among those who make online purchases even less frequently, just 18% prefer buying online – with 82% indicating that they prefer to shop in physical stores.

But even as many online shoppers express preferences for physical stores in the abstract, their ultimate decision of where to buy something often comes down to price. When asked a second question about their relative preferences for online and in-person shopping that incorporates pricing, fully 65% of online shoppers indicate that if they needed to make a purchase they would probably compare the price they could get online with the price they could get from physical stores and choose whichever one offered them the best deal. Another 21% of online shoppers say they would likely buy from stores without looking at prices online, while 14% indicate they would buy online without looking at prices in physical stores.

Users who frequently shop online are substantially more likely to say that they would typically choose to make purchases by simply buying online without visiting stores: 28% of weekly online shoppers say that they would likely do this if they needed to buy something, compared with 17% of monthly online shoppers and just 6% of those who buy online less often. But even among these frequent online shoppers, 62% say that they would typically compare the price they could get online and the price they could get in physical stores and choose whichever one is cheapest.

When buying something for the first time, Americans especially value the ability to compare prices and ask questions

Americans take a number of factors into consideration when shopping for something that they haven’t purchased in the past – especially the ability to compare prices from multiple sellers and to ask questions about what they are buying. When asked about the importance of seven different factors when buying something for the first time, 86% of Americans say that the ability to compare prices from several different sellers is either extremely (42%) or somewhat (44%) important, while a similar share say that being able to ask questions is extremely (42%) or somewhat (41%) important.

Other factors that Americans consider important include the ability to buy from stores or sellers they are familiar with (34% of Americans describe this as extremely important); the ability to read ratings or reviews that other people have posted online (32%); the ability to look at or try out the product in person (30%); and the ability to get advice or recommendations from people they know (23%). The ability to buy online – without having to make a trip to the store – ranks as the least important factor: just 42% of Americans say that this is at least somewhat important to them when buying something for the first time, and only 10% describe it as extremely important.

Regardless of their demographic characteristics, when buying something for the first time most Americans assign greater importance to being able to look at or try the product in person than they do to being able to buy online without making a trip to the store. However, frequent online shoppers are one of the few groups who place more importance on being able to buy online. Nearly three-quarters (72%) of weekly online shoppers say that being able to buy online without having to make a trip to the store is important to them when buying something for the first time (20% say it is extremely important). Meanwhile, a slightly smaller share (66%) says it is important to be able to try something out in person (with 15% saying this is extremely important).

Many Americans are using their cellphones while inside physical stores to help with purchase decisions or to get a better price

Today cellphone ownership is nearly ubiquitous, and roughly two-thirds of Americans have smartphones. And as the reach of these mobile devices have expanded, many consumers are using them to augment and assist with their physical and in-person purchasing experiences.

The survey asked about four different ways that people might utilize their mobile phones while making purchasing decisions inside physical stores and found that calls for advice and assistance are especially common: Nearly six-in-ten Americans (59%) say that they have used their cellphones to call or text someone while inside a store to discuss purchases they are thinking of making. Just under half (45%) have used their phones while inside a store to look up online reviews or to try and find a better price online for something they are thinking of purchasing. And a relatively small share of Americans (12%) have used their cellphones to physically pay for in-store purchases.

As noted above, a majority of Americans under the age of 50 have used cellphones to purchase something online – and this group is also especially likely to utilize their cellphones while making in-store purchasing decisions. Fully 70% of 18- to 49-year-olds have used their cellphones to call or text someone from inside a store to ask for purchasing advice, while 62% have used their phones to look up online reviews of something they were thinking of purchasing or to see if they could find a better price online. And nearly one-in-five (18%) have swiped their phones at the register to pay for purchases.

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COVID-19 Impacts on Online and In-Store Shopping Behaviors: Why they Happened and Whether they Will Last Post Pandemic

Jorge manuel diaz-gutierrez.

1 Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

Helia Mohammadi-Mavi

Andisheh ranjbari.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, people’s online and in-store shopping behaviors changed significantly. As the pandemic subsides, key questions are why those changes happened, whether they are expected to stay, and, if so, to what extent. We answered those questions by analyzing a quasi-longitudinal survey dataset of the Puget Sound residents (Washington, U.S.). We deployed structural equation modeling (SEM) to build separate models for food, grocery, and other items shopping to explore the factors affecting such changes. The results revealed that people’s online and in-store shopping frequencies during the pandemic were affected by their perceived health risk, attitudes toward shopping, and pre-pandemic shopping frequencies. Similarly, it was shown that how frequently people expect to shop post pandemic is influenced by their attitudes toward shopping, changes during the pandemic, and their pre-pandemic frequencies. We also classified respondents into five groups, based on their current and expected future shopping behavior changes, and performed a descriptive analysis. The five groups— Increasers , Decreasers , Steady Users , Returnees , and Future Changers —exhibited different trends across online and in-store activities for shopping different goods. The analysis results showed that, while 25% of the respondents increased their online shopping, only 8% to 13% decreased their in-store activities, implying that online shopping did not completely substitute in-store shopping. Moreover, we found that online shopping is a substitution for in-store shopping for groceries, while it complements in-store shopping for food and other items. Additionally, more than 75% of new online shoppers expect to keep purchasing online, while 63%–85% of in-store Decreasers plan to return to their pre-pandemic frequencies.

The rise of e-commerce, busy lifestyles, and the convenience of next- and same-day home deliveries have resulted in exponential growth of online shopping in the U.S., rising from 5% of the total retail in 2011 to 15% in 2020, and it is expected to grow even further in the future ( 1 , 2 ). Worldwide, spending on e-commerce passed $4.9 trillion in 2021 and it is projected to surge to $7 trillion by 2025 ( 3 ).

In the past few years, there has been ongoing research on how this growth would change people’s travel patterns and whether its effect on in-person activities would be substitution, complementing, or modification. However, there is no single answer to this question, given different product types, regions, demographics, and primary travel modes ( 4 – 7 ).

While online purchasing had already been experiencing a growth every year before 2020, the pandemic accelerated this trend. In 2020, online shopping constituted more than 20% of total spending on consumer goods worldwide in comparison to 16.4% in 2019 and 14.4% in 2018 ( 8 ). Before COVID-19, it was predicted that total e-commerce sales in the U.S. would grow up to $674.88 billion, yet the actual number turned out to be $799.18 billion ( 9 ). With a 15.9% growth, the U.S. is among the top 10 countries with the highest growth rate in online retail shopping in 2022 ( 10 ).

Embracing digital technologies and bringing shops into homes are among the immediate impacts of the pandemic restrictions and lockdowns, with the majority of people reducing their frequency of going to stores and adopting alternative shopping approaches such as curbside pick-up and home delivery ( 11 – 13 ). Based on the reports by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS), in Nov–Dec 2020, when the penetration of the coronavirus reached its first peak in the U.S., the percentage of people who decided to shop online instead of going to stores increased by up to 10% ( 14 , 15 ). During the early pandemic, about 35% of U.S. workers switched to remote working, and from March to April 2020, the average daily number of people staying home increased by 32 million and the total number of trips decreased by 2.5B ( 16 , 17 ). Dining-in restaurants were also banned in half of the U.S. states for several months in 2020, which resulted in a significant drop in the restaurant dine-in demand and shifted people toward online food delivery services, and buying groceries online rather than going to store ( 18 , 19 ).

These changes were also influenced by socio-demographic characteristics. For instance, according to the BTS, the percentage of people with an annual income close to $125,000 who replaced their in-store shopping by online shopping in Nov–Dec 2020 was twice those with an annual income of $25,000 ( 20 ). People in the neighborhoods with higher number of positive COVID-19 cases or higher spread rate of positive new cases were more likely to change their in-store shopping to online-shopping ( 19 , 21 ). Senior people were also shown to have higher tendency to shop online compared with younger generations, perhaps because of health and safety concerns ( 22 ). It is worth noting that these changes were not the same across all products; for example, online sales of food and beverage in the U.S. doubled in 2020, while home furniture online sales only increased by about 50% ( 23 , 24 ).

Another factor that is proved to have a major effect on people’s shopping behaviors and travel patterns during the pandemic is their risk perception and fears for their health ( 13 , 25 ). Irawan et al. found that perceiving COVID-19 as a severe disease decreased people’s tendency to do in-store grocery shopping ( 26 ). Similarly, Moon et al. found out that, during the pandemic, people who considered themselves less vulnerable to the infection were less likely to use online channels for shopping ( 27 ). Several studies have mentioned that the perceived health risk varies among different groups of population and depends on region, age, gender, education, race, and marital status ( 28 – 32 ).

Moreover, people’s online and in-store shopping behaviors are affected by their socio-demographic factors and their attitudes toward the activity ( 33 – 39 ). The advantages and disadvantages of online shopping over in-store shopping play a role in attitudes toward the activity ( 40 , 41 ). The advantages, such as receiving goods without leaving home, having access to a wider variety of products and information, and being able to compare them easily and efficiently, result in a positive attitude toward online shopping, especially during the pandemic given high perceived health risk, formal penalties, or both ( 42 ). On the other hand, online shopping has some disadvantages, such as transaction security concerns and long delivery times, and in-store shopping offers specific benefits, such as the ability to see, touch, feel, and try the products, ensuring the store’s environment quality, immediate possession of the product, social interaction, and entertainment ( 5 , 41 , 43 , 44 ). Therefore, even during the pandemic, some people maintained frequent in-store shopping trips ( 41 ).

Whether the pandemic-induced changes in online and in-store shopping are permanent is still debatable. Sheth discussed that people may find the new routine more convenient, affordable, and accessible, and therefore stick to it even after the pandemic is over ( 11 ). On the contrary, Dannenberg et al. argued that people’s motives to shop online only hold for the time of crisis, and online retailing will decline when circumstances change ( 45 ). Watanabe and Omori showed that most people used to shop online long before the pandemic, and they merely increased their frequency because of infection risk ( 46 ). So, the reasons behind the surge in online shopping might dissipate as COVID-19 recedes.

In this paper, we study how online and in-store shopping behaviors for different goods were affected during COVID-19, and whether those changes are expected to stay post pandemic. We analyze a quasi-longitudinal survey dataset from the Puget Sound region in Washington State, U.S., that includes data on people’s shopping behavior before and during pandemic, as well as their expected shopping behavior after pandemic. The dataset also contains information on socio-demographic characteristics, as well as psychometric questions about COVID-19 risk perception and attitudes toward shopping. Through descriptive analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM), we explore the factors that directly or indirectly affected people’s three shopping activities (online and in-store), for food, grocery, and other items (clothing, home goods, etc.), and investigate the similarities and differences amongst them.

This study is distinguished in several ways from the previous ones that investigated the impacts of COVID-19 on people’s shopping behavior: (1) it applies a unique descriptive analysis by classifying respondents based on their current and expected future shopping trends and studies how socio-demographic characteristics (directly and indirectly) influence people’s shopping behaviors by analyzing the similarities and differences between those groups; (2) it models online and in-store shopping jointly, considering covariations and dependencies between those two modes; (3) it applies the same methodology and set of variables to three different shopping activities (for food, grocery, and other items) and compares and contrasts their observed/expected trends and influencing factors; and (4) in addition to socio-demographic and attitudinal variables, it considers people’s baseline shopping behaviors (how frequently they shopped online and in-store before the pandemic) as factors affecting their expected post-pandemic shopping behaviors.

Data for this research came from a quasi-longitudinal survey of the Puget Sound region residents conducted by researchers at the University of Washington during 2020 to 2021 ( 47 ). The data was collected in three waves during the early, mid, and late COVID-19 pandemic: Wave 1 in June–July 2020, Wave 2 in March–May 2021, and Wave 3 in October 2021. The original dataset contained 3,810 observations. We reviewed and cleaned the data by removing duplicate responses and responses with contradictory or impossible information (e.g., noted “no use of the private vehicle” in one section and “driving twice a week to the supermarket” in another section; or noted “using shared ride-hailing service during pandemic” while the service was not available at the time). After cleaning the dataset, we ended up with a total of 3,559 valid responses across the three waves, with Waves 1, 2, and 3 representing 36.6%, 34.8%, and 28.6% of the observations, respectively.

In Waves 2 and 3, prior respondents who provided their contact information were contacted and invited to participate again, but new respondents were also recruited to make up for attrition. Therefore, the 3,559 observations correspond to 2,548 unique respondents who participated in one or more waves of the survey: 187 (7%) participated in all three waves, 637 (25%) responded to two waves, and 1,724 (68%) answered the survey only once. Since the two- and three-wave survey respondents constitute about a third of the total sample, the dataset will not be analyzed as a panel; rather we will focus on the total responses in each wave.

The survey had three sections. The first section collected data on respondents’ socio-demographics (including age, education, gender, marital status, occupation category, annual income, race, and household composition) and the frequency of three pre-pandemic online and in-store shopping activities (for food, grocery, and other items). Other items includes clothing, home goods, and so forth. In-store food shopping refers to dining in a restaurant, and meal delivery and pickup are considered online food shopping.

The second section of the survey asked questions about online and in-store shopping frequency during and post pandemic for all three activities. The during-pandemic questions asked about the shopping frequency “in the past month,” and post-pandemic questions asked about the expected shopping frequency for “when COVID-19 is no longer a threat.”

The third section included psychometric questions in a six-point Likert Scale, ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (6). These questions asked the level of agreement with a set of statements about the pandemic, and in-store and online shopping. The statements and the short variable names picked for them are as follow: “Wearing face-covering should be mandatory” (Mask Mandate), “Physical distancing is an efficient approach for controlling the coronavirus” (Physical Distancing), “Everyone should stay at home as much as possible until the coronavirus has subsided” (Stay at Home), “Shutting down businesses to prevent the spread of the coronavirus is not worth the economic damage that it causes” (Business Shutdown), “My friends and family expect me to stay at home until the coronavirus subsides” (Family Expectations), “I am concerned that my friends and family will experience serious health issues if they catch the coronavirus” (Family Risk), “Media is exaggerating the spread of the coronavirus” (Media Exaggeration), “Even if I don’t end up buying anything, I still enjoy going to stores and browsing” (Enjoy Browsing), “It is important to me to physically check out items before buying them” (Like Seeing Items), “In-store shopping is fun” (In-store Fun), “Eating in restaurants is a fun leisure activity” (Restaurant Fun), “I prefer buying groceries online rather than going to store” (Prefer Online), and “Shopping online is convenient” (Online Convenience).

Table 1 and Figures 1 and ​ and2 2 show the distribution of variables across the sample. Table 1 summarizes the distribution of socio-demographic characteristics, which are also presented for the entire Puget Sound region population for comparison ( 48 ). As seen in the table, the sample and Puget Sound population have similar incomes, employment rates, and gender distribution. However, the sample is a bit younger, more educated, and wealthier than the Puget Sound average population. The Latino and African-American populations are underrepresented in the sample, and the White population is overrepresented. The three waves have almost similar socio-demographic distributions. However, females are more represented in Wave 3, and the percentages of students and unemployed people dropped from Wave 1 to Wave 3. Also, as vaccines rolled out in early 2021, the percentage of vaccinated people increased in the survey, rising from zero in Wave 1 to 97% in Wave 3.

Distribution of Socio-Demographic Characteristics Across the Sample

Note : NA = not available.

Distribution of online and in-store shopping frequency across the sample for the three activities.

Distribution of the psychometric variables across the sample.

Figure 1 shows shopping frequency for the three activities across the survey waves. The pre-pandemic and post-pandemic (expected) distributions are consistent across Waves 1, 2, and 3 for all the activities. Moreover, for in-store activities, the pre-pandemic and the expected post-pandemic frequency distributions are similar, implying that people expect to return to their pre-pandemic in-store behaviors. The same cannot be said for online activities, as the statistics show that people expect to shop online more frequently after the pandemic than before it. It is also shown that the majority of respondents (∼80%) used to shop for groceries in-store a few times a week, while about the same percentage (∼85%) never did online grocery shopping before the pandemic. During the pandemic, in-store grocery shopping decreased, and online grocery shopping increased. Another notable observation is that in-store shopping frequency for food and other items experienced a significant drop during the pandemic (compared with pre-pandemic); however, both activities started to increase gradually (Waves 2 and 3 compared with Wave 1). Interestingly, this gradual increase (between the waves) in in-store shopping for food and other items did not translate into a decrease in the corresponding online activities.

The distribution of the psychometric variables is presented in Figure 2 . In most part, the distributions are similar for the three waves. However, the Stay Home, Mask Mandate, Physical Distancing, and Family Expectations variables exhibit lower agreement rates as the pandemic subsides. Similarly, the sample is less likely to support business closures to prevent the spread of the virus in the Wave 3 compared with Waves 1 and 2.

To achieve the study’s objectives, we used descriptive analysis and SEM. SEM is a technique that considers the mediation effect and incorporates direct and indirect effects in a single model, allowing each variable to be the cause and effect simultaneously ( 50 ). The exogenous and endogenous variables can be continuous or discrete, observed, or latent ( 51 ). Observed variables can be measured directly, while latent variables are determined using scaled indicators.

SEM has been used extensively in transportation research for various applications ( 52 ). In the context of online shopping, Gould et al. used SEM to find how the travel time saved by online shopping would be allocated to other activities, and Irawan and Wirza applied SEM to understand the relationship between online searching, online shopping, and shopping trips ( 53 , 54 ). In a similar approach to that taken in the present study for analyzing shopping frequencies, SEM has been used in Chen and Chen, Ning et al., and Zeballos Rivas et al. to investigate how exogenous variables, risk perception, attitudes, and subjective norms affected preventive behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic ( 55 – 57 ).

We have applied SEM to identify the factors affecting online and in-store shopping behaviors for different goods, and to measure their impacts on shopping behavior changes during the pandemic and in the future. Moreover, to understand how people changed and expect to change their shopping behaviors throughout the pandemic, we performed a descriptive analysis by first estimating the changes in shopping frequency between the three phases of the pandemic (pre-, during-, and post-pandemic), and then classifying the respondents based on the observed change trends. The details of the SEM methodology are presented in the remainder of this section, and the descriptive analysis is further explained in the Results and Discusson – Behavior Change Groups section.

We defined eight endogenous variables for the SEM model, including two latent variables. The endogenous variables are the frequency of online and in-store shopping before, during, and after the pandemic (six variables in total), COVID risk perception (CRP) (latent variable), and attitude toward shopping (ATS) (latent variable). The latent variables (CRP and ATS) are defined using observed indicators, which are the psychometric questions (about the pandemic, in-store, and online shopping) that were mentioned in the Data section. In the model, we considered the impact of ATS on people’s shopping frequencies before, during, and after the pandemic, and the impact of CRP on people’s shopping frequency during the pandemic.

Age, education, gender, marital status, employment, income, and race are the exogenous variables in the models, and we modeled their effect on CRP, ATS, and the pre-pandemic frequencies of online and in-store shopping. The pandemic moment (early, mid, late) was also incorporated in the model as an exogenous variable to estimate the changes in people’s behavior during the pandemic and their expected changes after the pandemic.

We assumed that the pre-pandemic frequencies of online and in-store shopping affected the corresponding frequencies during the pandemic, and that those, in turn, will affect both expected online and in-store shopping frequencies after the pandemic.

SEM Specification

SEM has two components: the measurement model and the structural model. The measurement model estimates the power of each indicator to present the corresponding latent variable. The structural model configures the relationships among the latent variables and new observed variables ( 58 , 59 ).

Measurement Model

To build the measurement model, we applied confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) ( 60 ). CFA assumes there is a latent variable (i.e., a factor) that influences a set of indicators, interconnecting their variances and covariances. The indicators’ variances can be divided into unique and common. The unique variance corresponds to the natural dispersion of each observed variable, while the common variance is the dispersion shared by all the indicators as they are all under the influence of the same latent variable. CFA analyzes these unique and common variances to form a latent variable and to evaluate the pre-established theoretical relationships between the latent variable and indicators ( 58 , 61 , 62 ).

Equation 1 shows the relationship between latent variables (factors) and the corresponding indicators in the CFA methodology:

X ji = the matrix of indicator values, for any observation i and observed variable j ,

F ki = the matrix of factor values, for any observation i and latent variables k ,

λ jk = the loading for each factor, and

e ij = the error term ( 63 ).

The estimation of the factor loadings ( λ jk ) and the error term ( e ji ) is done through the maximum likelihood method as shown in Equation 2 ( 57 ). The maximum likelihood method is an iterative process that minimizes the differences between the variance-covariance matrices of the hypothesized model ( Σ ) and the observed sample ( S ) :

trace = the sum of the diagonal values in the covariance-variance matrix, and

p = the number of indicators ( 64 , 65 ).

The predicted value of a latent variable ( LV Score ) is calculated through Equations 3 and 4 :

f i = the factor weight for observation i , and

( x i − x i ¯ ) = the normalized value of each indicator variable.

Structural Model

To build the structural model, we employed path analysis (PA). First, causal relationships (or paths) between the variables are hypothesized to draw influence chains in the model ( 60 , 66 ). Then, PA decomposes the correlations and covariations to establish direct and indirect effects and causality ( 66 , 67 ).

In particular, the structural model estimates coefficients for the hypothesized relationships, such that the differences between the variance-covariance matrices of the model and the sample are minimized. This process is typically done through the maximum likelihood method and may be modified slightly based on the type and probability distribution of the variables ( 52 ). In this study, we used the marginal maximum likelihood method, a variation of the maximum likelihood method that accounts for categorical, binomial, and discrete variables ( 51 , 66 , 67 ).

PA was applied to build three structural models for grocery, food, and other items shopping. We hypothesized numerous paths and relationships between indicators and latent variables, and eventually selected the best models (one model for each activity) based on the following tests. Since there is not a consensus about the acceptable threshold for the SEM indicators, we used two criteria for each test: a good-fit and a marginal-fit value, as recommended by Alhaimer, Irawan and Wirza, and Weston and Gove ( 42 , 54 , 68 , 69 ).

• Comparative fit index (CFI): >0.9 as good fit, >0.8 as marginal fit
• Tucker–Lewis index (TLI): >0.9 as good fit, >0.8 as marginal fit
• Root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA): <0.05 as good fit, <0.10 as marginal fit
• Standardized root mean square residual (SRMSR): <0.08 as good fit, <0.10 as marginal fit

The selected models and the associated goodness of fit measures are reported in the Results and Discusson – SEM Results section. For this study, we used the Lavaan package in the programming tool R, version 4.1.0.

Results and Discussion

This section is divided into two subsections: the first one offers a descriptive analysis of how people changed their shopping behavior during the pandemic and how they expect to change it in the future. The second section reports the SEM results, including the CFA and PA results.

Behavior Change Groups

To understand how people changed and expect to change their shopping behaviors throughout the pandemic, we estimated the changes in shopping frequency between the three phases of the pandemic (pre-, during-, and post-pandemic). Frequency in this context is calculated as the number of days in a month. We defined Initial Change as the difference between reported shopping frequencies in the pre-pandemic and during-pandemic phases, and Expected Future Change as the difference between the during-pandemic reported shopping frequency and the expected shopping frequency post-pandemic. Any increase or decrease in frequency smaller than 3 days a month was considered as no change.

We then classified the respondents into five groups as follows, based on their initial and late frequency changes. The groups are also shown in Figure 3 .

Changes in shopping frequency between the three phases of the pandemic (pre-, during- and post-pandemic).

• Increasers: Those who increased their shopping frequency during the pandemic, and expect to maintain a post-pandemic frequency higher than the pre-pandemic frequency.
• Future Changers: Those who did not change their shopping frequency during the pandemic, but they expect to change it after the pandemic.
• Steady Users: Those who did not change their shopping frequency during the pandemic, nor expect to change it after the pandemic.
• Returnees: Those who increased or decreased their shopping frequency during the pandemic, but expect to return to their pre-pandemic frequency after the pandemic.
• Decreasers: Those who decreased their shopping frequency during the pandemic, and expect to maintain a post-pandemic frequency lower than the pre-pandemic frequency.

The five groups did not present significant differences in their age, income, or occupation distributions. However, for all activities, online shopping Increasers have a higher percentage of females, and online shopping Decreasers are less educated with a larger percentage of non-Whites. Moreover, we found that in-store shopping Decreasers and Returnees and online shopping Increasers had higher perceived risks of COVID.

Figure 4 shows the changes in the sample’s shopping frequency throughout the pandemic for the three online and in-store activities (grocery, food, and other items). As can be seen, in-store and online activities present different trends for all three activities: the number of Returnees is at least three times higher for in-store activities, while online shopping has a larger number of Increasers and Steady Users.

The change in sample’s shopping frequency throughout the pandemic for the three shopping activities.

On average, 25% of respondents increased their online shopping activities, but only 8%–13% decreased their in-store activities. This shows that the increase in online shopping throughout the pandemic was not merely because of the substitution of in-store activities, and that people had other reasons/motives for increasing their online shopping. Moreover, there is a notable difference between the three activities. For food and other items, the number of in-store Decreasers was about one third of the online increasers. However, the corresponding ratio was more than half for grocery items. This suggests that the substitution effect of online shopping is much larger for grocery items compared with non-grocery items, and that for food and other items online shopping plays more of a complementary role that a substitution role. This is in line with the findings of a few previous studies ( 70 – 72 ), and as Pavel (2010) argued, probably because the information and communication technology (ICT) potential to replace in-person activities reduces as the necessity of that activity decreases ( 73 ).

A majority (∼75%) of the respondents who increased their online shopping frequency during the pandemic expect to maintain the same behavior after the pandemic, while 63%–85% of the people who decreased their in-store shopping frequency during the pandemic plan to return to their pre-pandemic frequencies once the virus threat subsides.

About half the sample (41%–61%) did not change nor expect to change their pre-pandemic behaviors (i.e., Steady Users) for almost all activities, except for restaurant dine-in (in-store food shopping), for which the Steady Users represent only 20% of the sample. Dining in a restaurant had the largest percentage (58%) of Returnees, followed by in-store other items shopping (30%) and in-store grocery shopping (23%). Overall, about 60%–80% of the respondents expect to repeat their pre-pandemic behaviors after the pandemic, combining Returnees and Steady Users.

When looking at changes between the waves, the proportion of in-store Returnees constantly decreased as the pandemic subsided (i.e., between Waves 1 and 3). For example, the percentage of Returnees for in-store grocery shopping dropped from 27% to 15%. Other items and food saw a similar trend, with respective drops from 40% to 16% and from 68% to 41%. Conversely, the proportion of in-store Steady Users increased during the pandemic for all the activities. This suggests that some people who expected to return to their pre-pandemic shopping frequency after the pandemic did so sometime in the mid and late pandemic.

The change groups for online shopping for groceries and other items remained the same across the three waves. Online food shopping is the only online activity with noticeable changes between early and late pandemic: the percentage of Returnees decreased by 8%, and Steady Users and Increasers each grew by 4% during that period.

SEM Results

The results are presented for the three stages that were explained in the Methods – SEM Specifications section: CFA, PA, and SEM.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Table 2 shows the CFA results for the two latent variables, CRP and ATS. The indicators used to estimate CRP are the Mask Mandate, Physical Distancing, Family Expectations, Family Risk, and Media Exaggeration. We tested Stay at Home and Business Shutdown indicators as well, but discarded them because of collinearity issues with other indicators. The three models present similar CRP coefficients. The coefficient signs imply that people with higher CRP are more likely to comply with control measures and are more mindful of their close ones’ opinions and health risks. Conversely, people with low CPR believe the media exaggerated the spread of the virus.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) Results

Note : ATS = attitudes toward shopping; CFI = comparative fit index; CRP = COVID risk perception; RMSEA = root mean square error of approximation; SRMSR = standardized root mean square residual; TLI = Tucker–Lewis index; NA = not applicable.

For the ATS variable, the indicators vary slightly across the three models: models for grocery and other items include the In-store Fun variable, while the food model includes the Restaurant Fun variable. Of the four indicators, the first three are associated with ATS with a positive sign, while Online Convenience has a negative sign. A higher ATS value means a larger tendency toward in-store shopping. We tested different combinations of indicators, such as separating the attitudes toward in-store and online shopping, and including Prefer Online, but the models in Table 2 are the best ones. However, while the goodness of fit measures for the latent variables in the grocery and other items models are within the desired range, the ATS latent variable in the food model did not show a good fit.

Path Analysis (PA)

Figure 5 shows the structure of the grocery model, derived from PA. We hypothesized different causal relationships between variables, and the selected paths are as follows. People’s socio-demographic characteristics affect their CRP, ATS, and pre-pandemic in-store and online shopping frequencies. The aforementioned variables and the pandemic moment affect how people changed their shopping frequencies during the pandemic. Finally, people’s during-pandemic in-store and online shopping frequencies and their ATS affect their expected shopping frequencies post pandemic. Models for food and other items have a similar structure. The PA results for all three models are presented in the next subsection.

Structure of the grocery model, derived from the path analysis (PA).

We also hypothesized and analyzed covariation paths. Table 3 shows the covariation analysis results for all three models. We found that Enjoy Browsing and In-Store is Fun are correlated and that the pre-pandemic online and in-store shopping frequencies depend on each other. The results showed that people’s frequency of shopping in-store for other items pre-pandemic was independent of their ATS. But for all other cases, it was shown that people with higher ATS shopped more frequently in-store and less frequently online. For initial frequency change (during the pandemic), the negative and significant covariations between online and in-store variables show that as people increased online shopping, their in-store shopping decreased. Conversely, the covariations for expected future frequency change between online and in-store variables is positive (except for grocery which is statistically insignificant), suggesting that in-store and online shopping for food and other items will have a complementary impact on one another in the post-pandemic era, and people who plan to increase their in-store shopping also expect to increase their online shopping.

Structural Equation Model (SEM) Covariation Results

Note : ATS = attitudes toward shopping.

Table 4 shows the SEM results. Based on the goodness of fit indicators, all three models fit the data well and can describe the sample’s behavior. However, the Grocery model presents the best fit for the data.

Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) Results

The results showed that, for pre-pandemic shopping frequency, age was not a significant predictor for in-store shopping of other items or food; however, it was shown that older people did in-store grocery shopping more frequently than younger people. For online shopping, though, it is the opposite. Age did not have a significant impact on online grocery shopping frequency as, for most part, online grocery shopping was not so typical among any age group before the pandemic. Nonetheless, age is negatively correlated to food and other items online shopping frequency, meaning that younger people used to do more online shopping (other than groceries) and food ordering than older people did.

Marital status was found as a significant variable for in-store shopping frequency (grocery and other items) before the pandemic, showing married people went to stores more often than single people, but it did not turn out to be a significant predictor for any type of online shopping.

Race did not show a significant impact on pre-pandemic in-store shopping frequency, except for grocery shopping. White, Asian, African-American, and Latino people did in-store grocery shopping at similar rates and lower than other races. On the other hand, White people were more likely to shop other items online and less likely to shop groceries online compared with the other races.

It was indicated that, before the pandemic, people with medium and high income (>$625K per year) were less likely to go to stores for shopping groceries and other items compared with low-income people. Conversely, those higher-income groups used to dine in restaurants more frequently. The results also showed that, before the pandemic, men used to go to restaurants more frequently than women. They also had a higher frequency of buying items (other than grocery) online and ordering food for delivery compared with women.

Looking at the CRP variable, we found that the pandemic moment significantly affected CRP, in that CRP subsided from early to late pandemic, as the knowledge about the virus and its consequences increased, the vaccines were developed, and the virus weakened over time. Asian, African-American, and Latino people showed a higher CRP compared with White people, which reflects the disproportionately high impacts of the pandemic on people of different races. The elder population, women, and educated people (with a college degree or higher) showed a higher CRP, and, surprisingly, being an essential worker did not significantly affect people’s CRP.

For all the three shopping activities, CRP had opposite effects on in-store and online shopping behaviors during the pandemic: the higher the CRP, the larger the increase in online shopping frequency and the decrease in in-store shopping frequency. However, the impact varies across the three activities for online shopping. While the CRP for other items and food shopping was about the same, people were more likely to increase their online shopping for groceries because of a higher risk perception during the pandemic.

For the ATS variable, the results showed that White people, couples, those with higher education, and those with higher income are more inclined toward online shopping, and essential workers are more likely to purchase items in store.

When analyzing the in-store shopping frequency change between pre- and during-pandemic phases (initial change), the results show that the change is heavily dependent (presenting largest coefficient) on people’s pre-pandemic in-store shopping frequency, but people also changed their shopping frequency based on the pandemic moment, how threatened they felt by the virus (CRP), and how they felt about in-store and online shopping (ATS). The results for online shopping frequency change between pre- and during-pandemic phases (initial change) were quite different, though. While the pre-pandemic online shopping frequency was still a significantly large predictor, its impact size was not very different from those of ATS and CRP. Also, the pandemic moment did not present a significant effect in either model.

As for the expected future changes, the three models show similar coefficients for all the dependent variables. Interestingly, if people increased their online shopping during the pandemic, they expect to increase their in-store activity in the future, and vice versa. A possible explanation is the substitution effect: people increased their online shopping frequency during the pandemic partly because of COVID-related limitations which prevented them from in-store shopping, and they expect to decrease their online shopping frequency and increase their in-store shopping frequency after the pandemic. However, the coefficients for in-store activity are seven to eight times smaller than those of the online activity. Therefore, while online shopping will grow at a higher pace, neither activity will entirely substitute the other one in the future.

Conclusions

We used descriptive analysis and SEM to find the direct and indirect factors that determine how people changed their in-store and online shopping behaviors during the pandemic and how they expect to shop in a post-pandemic era. We modeled online and in-store shopping activities jointly for three types of goods: groceries, other items, and food.

We defined two latent variables: CRP and ATS. The CRP score was derived from people’s opinions and beliefs about the seriousness of the pandemic, effectiveness of the control measures, and friends’ and families’ expectations and health risks. Higher CRP led to a larger increase in online shopping frequency and a larger decrease in in-store shopping frequency. The CRP also declined as the pandemic subsided. The ATS score was estimated based on the joy and/or convenience that people felt about online or in-store activities, and higher ATS meant a larger tendency toward in-store shopping. The SEM model showed that pre-pandemic shopping frequencies, CRP, and ATS were affected by people’s socio-demographic characteristics. The elderly, women, non-White, and highly educated people showed a higher CRP, and White people, married couples, non-essential workers, those with higher education, and those with higher income showed a larger tendency toward online shopping. Moreover, the covariations in the model indicated that, during the pandemic, online shopping played a substitutionary role for in-store shopping across all three shopping activities, meaning people increased online shopping as they decreased in-store shopping. For a post-pandemic era, though, the substitutionary role stays for grocery shopping: in-store and online shopping activities for food and other items shopping will be complementary, and people who plan to increase their in-store shopping for those goods also expect to increase their online shopping.

The SEM models revealed that people’s in-store and online shopping frequencies are decided based on several direct and indirect factors. During the pandemic, in-store shopping frequency was influenced indirectly by people’s socio-demographic characteristics and directly by the pandemic moment (early, mid, late), people’s CRP, ATS, and, most importantly, their pre-pandemic shopping frequencies. For online shopping, though, the direct predictors were slightly different: pre-pandemic online shopping frequency, ATS, and CRP affected people’s online shopping frequency during the pandemic, but the pandemic moment did not have a significant effect on it. It can be interpreted that people decreased their in-store activities at the beginning of the pandemic but increased them again over time as the pandemic subsided. Conversely, people changed their online shopping early in the pandemic and retained those behaviors during the pandemic. The models also showed that how people expect to change their online and in-store shopping post pandemic depends on their ATS and online and in-store shopping frequencies during the pandemic.

We also classified people based on their shopping frequencies before, during, and after the pandemic into five groups—Increasers, Decreasers, Steady Users, Returnees, and Future Changers—and analyzed the similarities and differences among them for online and in-store shopping activities. The five groups did not show significant differences in relation to age, income, and occupation. However, for all types of goods, online shopping Increasers included a higher percentage of females, and online shopping Decreasers were less educated and had a larger percentage of non-Whites. Moreover, in-store Decreasers and Returnees and online Increasers showed higher perceived risks of the virus.

The analysis showed that most people plan to return to their in-store pre-pandemic shopping behaviors while continuing to shop online. At least one third of the sample changed (either increased or decreased) their in-store and online shopping frequencies during the pandemic, and more than half of the respondents (∼60%–80%) expect to maintain or return to their pre-pandemic in-store shopping behaviors post pandemic. In-store and online activities presented different trends, in that, across all three activities, the percentage of people who expect to return to their pre-pandemic behaviors post pandemic were much higher (three times or more) for in-store activities, while online shopping had a larger percentage of people who either did not/expect to not change or kept/expect to keep increasing their frequencies during and post pandemic. It was also indicated that half of the sample increased their online shopping frequency, most of whom (∼75%) expect to maintain the new increased frequency post pandemic.

Moreover, although some people decreased their in-store shopping early in the pandemic, they expect to increase that after the pandemic. Therefore, we did not observe major changes in the expected shopping frequencies for a post-pandemic era compared with stated frequencies late in the pandemic (Wave 3).

The results also showed that the decrease in in-store shopping is much smaller (one third to half) than the increase in online shopping. This shows that large increases in online shopping throughout the pandemic were not entirely because of restrictions and the high CRP which cancelled in-store shopping activities; rather, more than half the respondents who increased their online shopping frequency during the pandemic did so for other reasons, supposedly such as convenience and easy alternatives comparison. It was also indicated that neither online nor in-store activity will entirely substitute the other in the future.

The data for this research came from the Puget Sound region in Washington State, U.S., so the specific findings and statistics will probably not hold for other regions. However, we believe the findings about the hows and whys of behavior changes over time, as well as the similarities and differences between the three types of shopping, provide interesting and somewhat unique insights into people’s shopping behaviors, generally and for a post-pandemic era.

Because of the limited number of psychometric questions in the survey, we defined a single latent variable (ATS) which included both online and in-store shopping for the three activities. Including more psychometric questions in the survey could help develop separate latent variables for in-store and online shopping or for the each of the three shopping activities, which could, in turn, result in better CFA and SEM estimates.

Author Contributions: The authors confirm contribution to the paper as follows: study conception and design: J. M. Diaz-Gutierrez, A. Ranjbari; data cleaning and processing: J. M. Diaz-Gutierrez; analysis and interpretation of results: J. M. Diaz-Gutierrez, H. Mohammadi-Mavi, A. Ranjbari; draft manuscript preparation: J. M. Diaz-Gutierrez, H. Mohammadi-Mavi, A. Ranjbari. All authors reviewed the results and approved the final version of the manuscript.

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding: The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

103 Online Shopping Topic Ideas & Essay Examples

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• Online Shopping: Benefits and Drawbacks Essay The last major advantage of online shopping is that it assists the customer to find the best deal on a product.
• Traditional vs. Online Shopping Traditional shopping involves shoppers physically entering a brick-and-mortar store or shopping mall to select items of their choice, pay for them in cash or by credit card, and either take delivery personally or have them […]
• Online Shopping vs. Traditional Shopping The advent of internet shopping in the late nineties created a revolution in the retail industry. It is possible to know about the sizes, features, and costs of products in online and traditional shopping.
• Advantages of Online Shopping In addition to this, the number of people adapting to online shopping is expected to grow, due to the numerous benefits associated with it.
• Influence of Online Shopping Apps on Impulsive Buying Olsen et al.go further and confirms that online shopping apps have increased impulse buying due to the wealth of information they provide the consumer.
• International Students Attitudes Towards Online Shopping The researcher strived to answer three key questions, which sought to find out students’ attitudes towards online shopping, the nationality of students who make the largest number of online purchases, and the barriers that prevent […]
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Consumers’ rational attitudes toward online shopping improve their satisfaction through trust in online shopping platforms

• Published: 02 September 2024

Cite this article

• Yaxing Lan   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0001-0275-8451 1 &
• Guofang Liu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2502-2244 1  

Currently, online shopping has become one of the main consumption methods, with online retail sales reaching 13.79 trillion yuan in 2022. However, not all consumers are satisfied with their online shopping experiences. This study proposed that consumers’ rational attitudes toward online shopping were an important influencing factor for their satisfaction. Additionally, consumers’ trust in online shopping platforms is a mediator in the above relationship. Two studies were conducted to investigate this proposition. In Study 1, participants’ rational attitudes were first operationalized by a procedure to approve their decisions. Then, their rationality, trust in online shopping platforms, and consumer satisfaction were measured. It was found that participants’ rational attitudes improved their satisfaction through the mediating role of their trust in online shopping platforms. Study 2 further examined the hypotheses by providing participants with either budget alert information or no information. The results showed that such alert information increased participants’ rationality and supported the findings of Study 1. Based on the results, rational consumers are more likely to be satisfied with their consumption, and trust is a key mechanism. Therefore, online shopping platforms and retailers should make efforts to improve consumers’ rational attitudes and protect their rights and interests to obtain consumers’ trust and a win‒win result between themselves and consumers.

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Lan, Y., Liu, G. Consumers’ rational attitudes toward online shopping improve their satisfaction through trust in online shopping platforms. Curr Psychol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06622-0

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• Comparing Online and In-Store Shopping Behavior Towards Luxury Goods
• Market Insights: Understand Online Shopping in Germany
• The Convenience and Benefits of Online Grocery Shopping
• Online Shopping Statistics and Consumer Behavior
• Future of Online Shopping: Evolving E-Commerce Trends
• The Rise of Social Commerce: A New Era in Online Shopping
• Accelerating Online Shopping: Strategies for E-Commerce Success in Europe
• E-Commerce: The History and Future of Online Shopping
• Online Shopping Intermediaries: The Strategic Design of Search Environments
• The Influence of Filipino Consumer Preference Towards Online Shopping
• Online Shopping Statistics for E-Commerce Strategy
• The Effect of Online Shopping Festival Promotion Strategies on Consumer Participation Intention
• Unveiling the Power of Online Shopping: Revolutionizing the Way We Shop
• COVID-19 Impacts on Online and In-Store Shopping Behaviors
• Strategies to Reduce Online Shopping Cart Abandonment
• Unlocking the Value of Strategic Friction in Online Shopping
• Online and In-Store Shopping Interactions for Non-Essential Experience Goods
• Augmented Reality in E-Commerce: The Future of Online Shopping
• The Price of Online Shopping: Preserving Privacy When It Comes to Trading Personal Data
• Online Shopping Safety Risks and How to Protect Yourself
• Save Money on Groceries: Online Shopping Tips
• The Effect of Perceived Risk on Online Shopping Intention
• Online Shopping: Revolutionizing Retail in the Digital Age
• Consumer Perceptions of Privacy and Security Risks for Online Shopping
• The Benefits of Shopping Online: Exploring the E-Commerce Revolution

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StudyCorgi. (2024, September 1). 54 Online Shopping Essay Topics. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/online-shopping-essay-topics/

"54 Online Shopping Essay Topics." StudyCorgi , 1 Sept. 2024, studycorgi.com/ideas/online-shopping-essay-topics/.

StudyCorgi . (2024) '54 Online Shopping Essay Topics'. 1 September.

1. StudyCorgi . "54 Online Shopping Essay Topics." September 1, 2024. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/online-shopping-essay-topics/.

Bibliography

StudyCorgi . "54 Online Shopping Essay Topics." September 1, 2024. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/online-shopping-essay-topics/.

StudyCorgi . 2024. "54 Online Shopping Essay Topics." September 1, 2024. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/online-shopping-essay-topics/.

These essay examples and topics on Online Shopping were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.

This essay topic collection was updated on September 9, 2024 .