What is inhibiting Portuguese consumers from buying on-line?

: the morphology of the barriers to online shopping in Portugal?

Abstract

This master thesis has the purpose of understanding some of the barriers to the e-commerce practices in Portugal. The Portuguese present a high level of internet penetration and internet activities, but engage in few online purchasing activities. This phenomenon is still not fully understood as the barriers for this online activity are still being debated worldwide. To understand the low e-commerce practices in Portugal a Literature Review was made, resulting in the selection of four constructs to be further studied: -Perceived Risks; -Perceived Ease of Use; -Perceived Usefulness; -Online Experience. A model was then proposed in order to understand the variation of the e-commerce practices that could be explained by the chosen constructs. The proposed model was tested in a sample of 101 respondents which allowed to find a positive correlation between the E-commerce Practices and the Perceived Ease of Use, the Perceived Usefulness, and the Online Experience constructs. A negative correlation was exposed between the E-commerce Practices and the Perceived Risks construct. The high values presented in the Perceived Risks construct show that the Portuguese still show some uneasiness in the security and difficulties in the e-commerce practices. The perception of the many different risks presented in online shopping seem to be the main reason for the low number of online purchases. The solutions for lowering the perceived risks of online shopping may be to increase the online experience of the individuals, since it is negatively correlated with the perception of the risks, or to solve each sub-risk with the proper resolution.

Date of Award	9 Oct 2015
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Susana Silva (Supervisor) & António Andrade (Co-Supervisor)