Title: Empirical analysis of online purchase of kid's products by urban Indian parents

Authors: Neena Sondhi

Addresses: International Management Institute, B-10 Qutub Institutional Area, New Delhi, India

Abstract: E-commerce is increasingly becoming the chosen retail format with young consumers regardless of geographic constraints. Thus, it is but natural that as these consumers mature to parenthood, they would increasingly use the channel for making purchases meant for their child. The phenomenon takes on added significance for an urban parent as he juggles between parental, personal and professional roles, no matter what be the gender. Further, this parent serves as the mentor in the child's consumer socialisation process. This exploratory study is an attempt to explore the online purchase pattern of the urban Indian parent for children product categories. Based on a qualitative study with urban Indian parents a quantitative study was accomplished on a sample of 236 Indian parents, residing in the National Capital Region, India. The study showed a promising trend both in terms of frequency and online spends on a variety of product categories. Further, a step-wise discrimnant function was formulated on the basis of 12 purchase parameters, which could help distinguish the heavy from light online buyer.

Keywords: online purchasing behaviour; kids products; emerging markets; discriminant analysis; India; urban parents; e-commerce; electronic commerce; online shopping; purchasing patterns; parental purchasing behaviour; children's products; young consumers.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEMR.2015.070804

International Journal of Electronic Marketing and Retailing, 2015 Vol.6 No.3, pp.214 - 238

Received: 23 Sep 2014
Accepted: 13 Dec 2014
Published online: 26 Jul 2015 *

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