Motivations and Social Media Influencing Online Purchase Intention in India

1. Introduction

E-commerce industry had shown unprecedented growth in online shopping due to ample of growth of internet subscribers. In 2014, India has 243 million subscribers of internet users and 35 million were online purchasers that result into unbelievable growth of e-commerce industry (PTI,2015). According to India Brand Equity Foundation (2017), Indian online retailers’ business is likely to close US$100 billion by 2020. This is possible only with the unprecedented growth of technology and quick adaption of technology and internet among Indian consumers especially young age groups. In rural areas the numbers of web browser are increasing at the rate of 58% annually (PwC, 2015). According to Dazienfo (2021) India’s e-commerce sales is expected to grow as $ 145 billion by 2025. Digital India (2021), about 448.0 million are social media users in India till January2021, and during pandemic (COVID-19) between 2020 and 2021, the number of social media has become 32.3% of the total population. Online buying products has become one of the most common practice for consumers worldwide, especially for those countries which have developed infrastructures in marketing (Kau et al., 2003). But in recent years it has been observed that changes occurred in consumer’s buying intention and they shifted their preferences from physical shopping to online shopping and also believe in digital payment especially developing nations like India (Enormous, 2020) and advancement of technology era it has been found paradigm shift from larger screen to smaller screen (Singh A et al.,2019). Due to change in intention of buyers, there is a need to study the new pattern of consumer’s buying intention in terms of motivation and marketing strategies. Singla and Bansal(2015) suggested that shopping can be enhanced by applying debit cards due to their usefulness and easy to use while doing shopping. According to Childers TL (2001) and Ha (2020) online shopping motives can be categorized into two factors such as utilitarian and hedonic motivation. Similarly, according to Khalifa and Liu (2007), online shopping culture may be influence in examining the online buying intentions which is based on hedonic and utilitarian motivation. Hedonic shopping motivation is consumer’s aspirations to fulfil their psychological needs like emotion, do online shopping with fun, excitement and they find entertaining as well while doing online shopping. Lee and Kim (2018) defined hedonic shopping motivation believe in the fulfilment of non-functional factors of consumers. In other term, utilitarian motivation refers to consumer’s cognitive and functional aspects like searching about products, services and prices before actual purchase of products and services (Hoffman & Novak, 1996).