Факторы, влияющие на удовлетворенность покупателей онлайн-покупками продуктов питания в условиях COVID

Relevance of the study
With the expansion of the internet and its acceptance as a new sales and marketing channel, online shopping has emerged as a viable purchasing mode with significant growth potential. Companies from completely different spheres are now actively offering their products and services on the Internet, and customers are increasingly switching to digital channels. In this respect, the retail companies are not an exception – the global e-commerce sales and their share in total sales of retail companies shows consistent growth. According to statistics, e-commerce sales almost tripled, comparing 2014 and 2019 figures (Statista, 2020), and the share increased by 4% (from 10 to 14%) in three years from 2017 to 2019 (eMarketer, 2019). So, online purchases of goods are continuously gaining popularity.
In this respect, Russia currently is not lagging behind and even surpasses other countries in some ways. Initially, Russia was adopting e-commerce much slower than the majority of developed countries. However, in last years and, especially, with the advent of COVID-19 pandemic industry has shown a dramatic and one of the fastest growths (22%, 28% and 44% in 2018, 2019 and 2020, respectively) (Data Insight, 2021), while customers have demonstrated great pace of new technologies acceptance. According to the research done by Online Retail Association, in the 2020 the share of e-commerce in the total retail turnover reached 9.6% (with absolute maximum of 10,9% in the first half of the year), compared with only 6.1% in 2019 and around 4% in 2018 (Online Retail Association, 2021, 2020, 2019). So, Russia is now approaching the level of the most developed countries in terms of online sales, such as the United States and China, with shares of 14% and 24.9% respectively (UNCTAD, 2021).
Online grocery has been also expanding its presence in Russia in the last years, catching up with western trends. It showed stable high growth (50% in 2018, 70% in 2019), but its share in total grocery market was still only 0.15% in 2018, while already in 2016, the share of online grocery in South Korea was 16,6% (the largest), 6,9% in the United Kingdom and around 4% in the US (Statista, 2019). According to PWC’s Global Consumer Insight survey (PWC, 2019), around 54% of Russian consumers were interested in purchasing groceries online in 2018 that was really close to the figure for the US which is 59% (eMarketer, 2019). However, the share of people who really bought some food products online in Russia was only 16% in 2019, comparing with 48% in the US. At the same time, the research has shown that positive online grocery shopping experience has a great favorable effect on repeating purchase intention (e.g. Mortimer et al., 2016; Chiu et al., 2014; Abdul-Muhmin, 2010). From this we can conclude that people in Russia needed some trigger to start buying food online and 2020 has given such a push with COVID-19 pandemic.
Due to the COVID-19 related introduction of self-isolation and increased health concerns people were trying not to leave their apartments without a serious need which has led to boost in delivery services use and online shopping. In 2020 online grocery sales in Russia soared by 314% compared to 2019 – from 43 billion to 135 billion rubles (INFOLine, 2021). Moreover, according to the survey, conducted by Yandex, 56% of customers are not planning to reduce the share of online grocery purchases even after all restrictions are lifted (Yandex, 2020).
Relying on this evidence, we can suppose that online grocery will develop actively further even when the situation with COVID-19 will stabilize. So, to catch up with trends and to gain a competitive advantage more and more conventional retailers will be using internet shopping as part of their business strategy. And pure online services will also grow. At the same time, the importance of customer satisfaction in traditional and online shopping has been recognized largely in the literature, showing that it has a significant impact on acquisition of new customers and retention of already existing ones (Yi and La, 2004; Fraering and Minor, 2013; Rita et al., 2019). Thus, currently it is very appropriate and relevant to study customer perception of grocery e- commerce to get better understanding which factors affect customer satisfaction with the service in order to provide companies with the basis to improve their services, retain and attract clients.
Research gap
The review of fundamental and current literature on a global scale showed a great number of research has been conducted concerning online grocery customer experience, including ones identifying what consumers see as positive and negative aspects of this experience, what motivate them for its adoption (e.g. Morganosky and Cude, 2000; Robinson et al., 2007; Blitstein et al., 2020), what barriers interfere customers from shopping for groceries online (e.g. Ramus and Nielsen, 2005; Huang and Oppewal, 2006; Alam et al., 2016) and so on. Customer satisfaction with e-grocery was also studied from different perspectives, considering its drivers (e.g. Souitaris, and Balabanis, 2007; Sreeram et al., 2017) and how it influences other constructs such as trust or loyalty (e.g. Mortimer et al., 2016; Park and Thangam, 2019). So, even though, online grocery shopping is rather narrow topic (compared with the whole online shopping experience which is investigated to a much greater extent), due to its active adoption in some countries and high interest from real business, there is a certain interest for exploration and large applicability of obtained results.
However, most of the existing models and frameworks have been derived mainly from the research conducted in limited number of countries, due to uneven geographical expansion of grocery e-commerce. The factor of different cultural, social and economic background cannot be fully eliminated, so the results cannot be transferred directly to any other context. As it was mentioned, online grocery was developing actively in Russia only during last years. Before, there was only a small number of offers and the number of customers was limited. Thus, there is a lack of researches on the topic that was applied specifically to Russian context. It is still quite new experience for people and for investigators as well.
Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic definitely has introduced changes in the global and national environment, modifying customer behavior in many spheres, including traditional and online grocery shopping. Researches, understanding that such serious shift can create new behavioral patterns, change motivational factors and people’s perception of the service, already have started to include COVID-19 context in their studies (e.g. Dannenberg et al., 2020; Chang and Meyerhoefer, 2020; Bauerová, 2021). Thus, consideration of the customer’s position toward online grocery in connection with the changed external conditions is another gap that exists.
So, according to the defined issues, the research gap, to be addressed, lies in the lack of research of online grocery, as a whole, and customer shopping experience and attitude towards it specifically in Russia and taking into account the influence of COVID-19 pandemic.
Research purpose and tasks
Hence, taking into account specified research gap, the purpose of this study is to investigate factors that can affect and determine customer satisfaction with online grocery shopping in the conditions of the Russian market during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the following research questions were formulated:
RQ1. What are the drivers of customer satisfaction with online grocery shopping experience?
RQ2. Is there any impact, imposed by COVID-19 pandemic on customers’ evaluation of these drivers?
RQ3. Do findings, obtained on the sample including Russian customers, correspond with existing findings for other countries?
The work involves conducting a primary study, that is, collecting real data, on the basis of which hypotheses defined by analyzing the available literature on the topic will be tested. To achieve the stated goal and answer the research questions, the following tasks were set:
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1. To analyze the literature concerning the phenomenon of e-grocery and drivers of customer satisfaction with it;
2. To create a conceptual model of customer satisfaction with online grocery shopping experience and to determine the research hypotheses, relying on existing studies;
3. To conduct a primary study in form of the survey to test stated hypotheses, verify the model and generalize results;
4. To prepare a systematic summary of the results obtained and to discuss their theoretical and practical implications and significance.
At last, since the topic of interest is rather novel and not so much studies are available on it, the research of this master’s thesis will be of exploratory type. The structure of this work corresponds to the tasks set. The first chapter provides an analysis of the existing literature and theoretical basis necessary for understanding the object and subject of research, namely, the e- grocery service concept and customer satisfaction construct are considered. In addition, the first chapter contains a brief description of the main differences between offline and online shopping experience, a specification of drivers of customer satisfaction with online grocery shopping, and at the end the research model and the hypotheses of the current study are presented. The second chapter is devoted to the methodology of the primary research, the description of the general population and obtained sample, the structure of the survey, statistical data processing tools. The third chapter presents the substantive results of the conducted research and verification of the proposed hypotheses, accompanied by the description of theoretical and practical implications, limitations and areas for future research.