The influence of personality traits on consumers’ willingness to buy groceries online in South Africa

Abstract

Online shopping attracted a great deal of attention from researchers over the past two decades. The advent of the Internet and other disruptive technologies has had a fundamental effect on how consumers buy goods and services today. People can now order groceries online to be delivered to their homes, but this is still a relatively new concept in the South African market. Consumers remain sceptical about this way of shopping. Many researchers have studied consumer behaviour of online shopping and the conceptual factors influencing their intention to purchase groceries online. However, the influence of personality traits on consumer willingness to adopt online grocery shopping is largely under researched, especially in South Africa, and thus the researcher intends to help fill this gap. The purpose of the study is to analyse the relationship between personality traits based on the Big Five theory and consumer willingness to buy groceries online. The main objective of the study is to determine psychographic segmentation of consumers to assist retailers to develop strategies targeting those consumers who are not purchasing groceries online to become more frequent online grocery shoppers. Based on a positivist philosophical paradigm, the study has adopted a cross-sectional design and a quantitative method. Random sampling was used to collect data through an online survey from 2788 participants, of which only 1992 surveys were usable. The data was collected from an online consumer panel in South Africa through a marketing research company. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences version 27 was used to analyse the data and a discriminant function analysis to test for differences between the groups. The results showed significant differences between the groups of consumers who are willing and unwilling on agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience. In addition, the results also revealed that agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience have a positive relationship with willingness to buy groceries online, and that agreeableness is the strongest predictor of consumer willingness to buy groceries online. However, there were no statistically significant differences found between the groups of consumers who are willing or unwilling for extraversion and neuroticism.