A Characterization of Non-buyers in B2C E-Commerce and the Drivers to Turn Them into E-Shoppers

This exploratory study deals with the characterization of non-buyers groups in the context of business-to-consumer electronic commerce (B2C-EC), based on their motivations for not purchasing on the Internet and explores which factors would incline them to make a first purchase on a website. In order to do so, a household panel survey was taken to 1075 Spanish respondents and analyzed with a Latent Class Analysis (LCA) approach for grouping both consumers’ motivations to reject online shopping and possible motivations to start buying online. After the definition of both sets of groups, a k-means clustering was performed in order to relate both groups in disjoint sets. The results from our study show that there are mainly three types of causes for not shopping through the electronic channel –namely, absence of physical presence of the goods or channel preference, security concerns and privacy risks, and lack of internet access and/or skills– and six different attitudes towards future use of Internet as a shopping channel, revealing a total of ten different sets of non-buyers. Implications for theory and practice are discussed in the final section.