A Study of Customer Perceptions towards Online Shopping in Indore.INTRODUCTIONWhen you buy a product or a service over the internet, instead of going to a traditional brick-and-mortar store, it is called online shopping. It is where buyers and sellers don not meet each other and products can be brought online by saving lot of time. Evolution of ecommerce was first in the 1995 mainly by the biggest giants Amazon.com and eBay.com. Globally, an increasing number of people are buying over the Internet because it is more convenient.

In India the online shopping has increased drastically as it is B2C marketing that is Business to Customer. Every website show their uniqueness by their different features provided.For example: FLIPKART talks about cash on delivery with many offers, MYNTRA talks about trial (of garments) and payment after delivery etc. Like this each portal focuses on increasing their sales or visitors to the site by associating with top brands such as Levis, Melange, BIBA, Gucci etc., not only with dresses and shoes, but also with other products such as books, accessories, electronics, beauty products, home dcor and excellent deals and discounts on food with top restaurants.

There is a common saying about the Indian retail consumers' "can't touch, won't buy" mentality.However, this is gradually changing with the rising trend of online shopping. India's ecommerce market grew at a staggering 88 per cent in 2013 to $ 16 billion, riding on booming online retail trends and defying slower economic growth and spiralling inflation, according to a survey by industry body Assocham. It is expected to touch $56 billion by 2023-- 6.5percent of the total retail market. "Besides electronics gadgets, categories like apparel and jewellery, home and kitchen appliances, lifestyle accessories like watches, books, beauty products and perfumes, baby products have witnessed a significant upward movement. In order to save time and buy products online marketing has helped a lot of customers as variety of brands are available to choose from, providing value added services at lower prices, giving discounts and other gift items on purchase, security, clear information regarding delivery time, transparent information regarding the product and providing price comparisons.Finally tendency of Indian customers is to mainly purchase the best brands that do not cost much. Customers are ready for Online shopping as India ranks 3rd after the USA and China in the usage of internet as per economic times April 2012.Various researches have conducted research on increasing trend of online shopping. Some have studied factors as to what influences customers towards it, some have done a comparison study between Male and Female customers as to study who is attracted more towards it, while some have studied customer perception towards online shopping.Online shopping has become a new trend and people find it more convenient and easy. In this busy era people don't have time to spend several hours in traditional way of shopping, online shopping has solved this problems of consumers and have made shopping possible just at a click.

Organisations have long used the traditional media like television, cinema, radio and newspapers for promotional purposes. Advertisements have been existent in various forms such as print, radio, outdoor, TV etc. The media consumption habit of today consumer has a most important change. The growth of internet in last two decades has however, changed the scenario of promotion for organizations. Internet is a short form of the technical term internet work that is the result of interconnecting computer networks with special gateways or routers. The Internet is also often referred to as the net. Internet marketing first began in 1990 with just text-based websites which offered product information. Since then, this new mode of marketing has grown by leaps and bounds. Internet has made it so flexible and convenient for companies to approach consumers and vice versa around the clock 24*7. The internet boom has enabled new forms of human interactions through instant messaging, internet forums, and social networking. Internet has also revolutionised the world of business through online shopping etc. that has come as a boon both for major retail outlets and small artisans and traders. Internet browsers and online shoppers are the target audience of companies that heavily promote through the online. Due to the increasing penetration of internet and activities such as social media networking; consumers, especially youth, are spending longer hours on the internet which makes it an efficient tool for companies to generate advertisements to attract them. Online advertising industry in India is growing dynamically and is set to increase further. Online advertising is a form of advertising that uses the Internet and World Wide Web in order to deliver marketing messages and attract customers. Examples of online advertising include contextual ads on search engine results pages, banner ads, Social network advertising, advertising networks and e-mail marketing. The unique characteristic of online advertising is the availability of information and content that is not limited by geography or time for its audience. Companies are now spending huge amounts on advertising through the online medium that helps them to target their specific group of consumers. With rapid changes and advances in technology, companies are experimenting with various forms of online advertisements like floating ads, click ads, pop up ads, flash ads, pop under ads and video ads. The consumers are also responding in terms of their varying attitudes towards the use of technology for promotions.

Attitude is a learned predisposition to behave in a consistently favourable or unfavourable manner with respect to a given object (Schiffman and Kanuk, 2006). Consumer attitudes are a composite of a consumers.(1) Beliefs about(2) Feelings about (3) Behavioural intentions toward some object--within the context of marketing. These components are viewed together since they are highly interdependent and together represent forces that influence how the consumer will react to the object. Numerous researchers have investigated on-line buying behaviour over the past several years (e.g., Jarvenpaa and Todd1997, Lohse and Spiller 1999, Swaminathan et al. 1999, Bhatnagaretal. 2000). However, little research has addressed consumer attitude towards online promotions. The purpose of this research paper is to assess the consumer reactions towards online promotions. We first review background relevant to online shopping and promotion tools used by companies operating in the on-line environment. We next develop research questions to guide our investigations. We then report the results of a large survey aimed to get insights into consumers experiences with on-line promotions and on how companies can take maximum advantage of these tools.

LITERATURE REVIEWThere are a few studies in literature on online advertising and online promotions and their implications on the future of marketing. According to previous studies, consumers characteristics and goals have been found to influence their behaviours such as purchasing, revisiting intentions, and attitudes toward a website (Wolfinbarger & Gilly, 2001). Consumers personalities that lead to different shopping behaviours can be classified in two main orientations, i.e., utilitarian and hedonic. Consumers who are utilitarian have goal-oriented shopping behaviours. They usually shop online based on a rational necessity that is related to a specific goal (Kim & Shim, 2002). On the other hand, consumers who are hedonists have experiential shopping behaviours. The hedonists do not only gather information to shop online but also seek fun, fantasy, arousal, and enjoyable experiences (Monsuweetal, 2004). In light of this, hedonic and utilitarian consumers handle and interact with websites differently because of their different personalities and motivations. The companies that engage in online promotions must accordingly target their promotions to both hedonic and utilitarian groups of Researchers Alok Gupta , Bo-chiuan Su, Zhiping Walter concluded in their study that the customers in online shopping cannot be trusted as they have a habit from switching from one site to another for purchasing. So, it cannot be said that if a customer is buying from a site then next time for shopping he/she will purchase from the same. Thus, customers are not loyal to a particular site. They say online shopping has some limitations such as only those customers can shop if they have knowledge of operating computer and can access internet properly.

Peet, J. (2000) found that online shopping offers a risk factor where the point comes of touching the product physically. There is no doubt that the description of product is given in a properly organized form but certain customers find it difficult to purchase until and unless they touch the product. This risk is majorly involved in certain products such as clothes, food-products, home dcor items etc.

According to the researchers Tonita Perea y Monsuwe, Benedict G.C. Dellaert and KO de Ruyter there are n type of customers. Some consider online shopping as a destination for purchase; on the other hand some consider it as a source of fun and entertainment.Those people who are serious customers say that online shopping offers them a wide range of products and saves their time of retail shopping where they only have few choices whereas other category of customer take online shopping just to get a online shopping experience.

Na Wang 1, 2, Dongchang Liu 1, Jun Cheng 2 (2008), there are number of factors that are responsible for shopping from online websites. They found that some customers find online shopping as a supplement to traditional shopping. They say that it saves them from travelling in traffic, waiting at every signal and wander from one shop to another. They also say that they have the flexibility to shop online whenever and wherever they want and they do not have to take out time from their working hours and go for shopping.

OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY

1. To study the factors influencing people towards online shopping.

2. To know the trend of online shopping particularly in Indore.

3. To know why people hesitate to buy products online.

4. To study which category of people are attracted more towards online shopping

RATIONALE OF STUDY

The rapid growth in number of internet users in India provides a bright prospect for e-marketers. This rapid growth in the number of internet users has promoted a belief in many business circles that the web represents a huge marketing opportunity. As now the days people have more money as they spend more time on the internet so from their busy schedule the prefer to buy online product, as they get better offer on the various website so they prefer to shop online rather to go for buying in the shopping mall which saves their time too.This study will help to analyse various factors which could become an advantage to online sellers in order to increase the market share.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGYThis research includes primary as well as secondary data. The primary data is collected through questionnaire; Data has been collected from individuals of different age groups i.e. from students, working professionals and Business Class people. Secondary data has been collected from Various Journals, Newspaper and Internet.

The Study: This is an exploratory study that aims to identify the different consumer perceptions of online promotions. The Sample: The sampling frame will comprise of various Internet users in Indore. Data was collected from a sample of 100 respondents preferably youngsters.

REFERENCES

1. Alok Gupta, Bo-chiuan Su, Zhiping Walter an Empirical Study of Consumer Switching from Traditional to Electronic Channel: A Purchase Decision Process Perspective2. Bhatnagar, A., Mishra, S. and Rao, H. R., 2000, On risk, convenience, and internet shopping behavior, Communications of the ACM, 43, 98 105. 3. Chiu Y.B, Lin C.P and Tang L.L., 2005, Gender Differ: Assessing a Model of Online Purchase Intentions in Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Innovation & Management, International Journal of Service Industry Management, 16,5, 416-435 4. Chu, C.W. and Lu, H.P., 2007, Factors Influencing Online Music Purchase Intention in Taiwan: An empirical study based on the value-intention framework, Journal of Internet Research, 17, 2,139-155. 5. Jarvenpaa, S. and Todd, P.,1997, Consumer reactions to electronic shopping on the World Wide Web, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 1, 59 886. Na Wang, Dongchang Liu, Jun Cheng (2008) "the Influencing Factors of OnlineShopping, Proceedings of the 11th Joint Conference on Information Sciences (2008)Published by Atlantis Press7. Sapna Rakesh and Arpita Khare, "Impact of promotions and value consciousness in online shopping behaviour in India", Journal of Database Marketing & Customer.Strategy Management (2012) 19, 311-320. doi:10.1057/dbm.2012.30 shopping-in India- are-we-ready-for-it-.html