A STUDY ON THE FACTORS RESTRICTING ONLINE BUYING BEHAVIOR OF SEMI-URBAN COLLEGE STUDENTS OF NORTH KARNATAKA

Commerce to e-commerce and retailing to e-tailing is the transformation we are witnessing in today's businesses, with online shopping becoming a trend across the world. The growing popularity of online buying is due to the utmost convenience it provides, Increasing advertisement, and promotional activities undertaken by the service providers has increased awareness towards online shopping. Besides the advent of smart cell phones, and touch screen devices have a greater impact on online marketing of a large variety of goods and services. Having large and vast coverage of customers, the online marketing is not only attracting, the learned computer savvy people but also the illiterate people having moderate cell phone awareness about cell phone usage also in its coverage. Among them college students are the most tempted customers towards the online trade in the urban areas of the state. On the other hand, despite fast spread of online buying, there are still many hiccups or bottlenecks observed in online buying which are more severe in the semi urban areas of the state. With this background the main purpose of this paper is to study the factors that are restricting or affecting the growth of online buying in the semi urban and rural areas of the state. Simple explorative research design is adopted to explore these factors in this paper. Further it is attempted to analyse primary data collected in this regard by applying simple correlation matrix and factor analysis concepts to crop up important factors that have bearing on the online buying behavior of the college students in North Karnataka.