Exploring Contextual Factors of User E-Commerce Adoption During Coronavirus

Introduction

In late 2019, due to the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic, the global economy faced a severe downfall. This also affected the entrepreneurial marketing decisions intensely because the pandemic indirectly impacted various social issues like import and export delays, shared price downfall, and food crises (Bhattacharjeea & Jahanshahi, 2020; Jahanshahi et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2020). The pandemic also provoked production breaks in many manufacturing companies throughout the world. Businesses struggled to adopt and adapt in times of crisis times to maintain their profit and existence in the markets. This left businesses with the only choice to sell their products and services to customers through e-commerce platforms (Fan et al., 2020). Some businesses managed to build e-commerce platforms while others, limited in resources, faced tremendous challenges. Businesses raced against time to build e-commerce platforms and transform their business activities into remote work, and users shopped online during the pandemic (Jahanshahi et al., 2020). The rapid transition from traditional to online shops was a challenge for companies and individuals (Fisher et al., 2020; Mohmmed et al., 2020).

With the recent spread of the pandemic, consumers’ shopping behaviors have been widely affected, and economies have been hit hard. This has been specifically witnessed in the rapid shift of consumer buying behavior driven by strict government quarantine regulations to slow the spread of Coronavirus. The population was divided between users of e-commerce and people that feared using e-commerce and resisted the use of the internet to continue their daily duties during the pandemic. In addition, there is limited literature on user fear when using e-commerce, especially during the pandemic. This research addresses such problems to understand users’ fears and experiences when using e-commerce.