Comparing Customer Attitude towards Amazon and Flipkart in Patna

After the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic there had been huge changes in the shopping behaviour of customers across world. From bulk buying to online shopping there is a major change in what, when and how people are buying. As people are avoiding going to public places, online shopping has become even more prominent now. This paves the way for the online shopping stores giving them competitive advantage over traditional shopping stores. Amazon and Flipkart, which are the two most leading online shopping stores have also been beneficially affected by this shift of customer purchasing behaviour. Both Amazon and Flipkart are seeing accelerated growth in online sales fuelled by first time buyers and sellers from small towns. In this study the overall customer attitude towards the two sites is measured and compared with the help of Fishbein Multi-Attribute Model. An analysis is done to determine the important attributes that matters more to the customers ,on which these online sites need to focus on and also the perception of customers on performance of the two sites on those attributes is assessed.


Introduction
We are living in the era of technology where every sphere of our life is dependent on technology. Especially after the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic, even those things which people were not doing so much through electronic medium, they are also now being done electronically like elearning and recent work from home culture where the office work is also being done online. Eshopping has also been impacted by this recent development. There has been a huge shift in consumer buying behaviour from traditional to online shopping mode. As people are embracing social distancing so as to slow down the spread of virus there had been huge drop off in traditional shopping and significant uptick in online shopping. People are turning to e-commerce to purchase those items they otherwise would have purchased in person from brick and mortar stores.
The quantity of purchase people were making online has increased substantially as well as there is addition in number of new buyers. This whole development has paved up way for immense growth of online shopping stores. This is an opportunity for online shopping stores to build up trust among customers so as to convince them for future purchase also through online stores rather than traditional ones. Amazon and Flipkart which are two most prominent online shopping stores have seen huge surge in their sales in recent time. This paper shows comparative analysis of consumer's belief on different attributes towards Amazon and Flipkart in Patna. It also finds out the importance of different attributes that determines the attitude of customers.

Purpose of the Study
The online marketers not only face stiff competition from traditional marketers but also from online marketers. In such a scenario they have to be very swift and fast in their customers approach. This study will help the online marketers in understanding their performance with respect to their competitors and also help them in identifying factors which they need to work on to get a competitive edge over the other. 1.2 Objectives of the Study 1. To find out whether there is any significant difference in customer belief on performance of Amazon and Flipkart on different attributes. 2. To determine the importance of different attributes which effect customer attitude.

Review of Literature
 Shahriar Azizi and Masoud Javidani (2010) had done a study on e-shopping intention in Iranian perspective. In this paper path analysis was done to show that e-benefit had positive effect on e-attitude. It also showed that eattitude has a positive effect on e-shopping intention.  Yashika Guleria (2018) had done a study to understand how products and services are evaluated by customers within and across online and offline shopping channels.  Rupali Rajesh (2018) in the study identified the factors which influence online shoppers in Pune area and also determined the demographic factors that influence the level of customer satisfaction.  Jasuli (2018) in the study has done Multi-Attribute Analysis Using Fishbein Model to study student attitude towards e-learning. The findings of the research show that a student attitude towards e-learning is positive. Also easy accessibility is the most important attribute towards use of e-learning.

Research Design and Data Collection Method 3.1 Study Design
This is a descriptive research as it helps to describe the nature of the population. There are two types of research method, quantitative and qualitative. In this study we have used quantitative method as it is more precise and faster in comparison to qualitative.

Data Collection
This study is based on primary as well as secondary data. The survey method has been used to collect data through standardized questionnaire. In the first part of the questionnaire there were questions about the demography of the respondent such as gender, age etc. In the second part of the questionnaire were the questions based on different attributes that determines customer attitude. These attributes have been identified with the help of secondary data collected through websites, books, and journals.

Sampling
The target population for the study is customers of Patna region in Bihar. The sample size is 160. Selection of sample was done through nonprobability convenience sampling method. 3.4 Questionnaire Design 7point Semantic Differential Scale was used to derive respondent's belief towards the different attributes. The questions ranged from extremely satisfied to extremely dissatisfy. For determining the importance also, 7 point Semantic differential scale was used where the questions ranged from extremely important to extremely unimportant.

Data Analysis
Hypotheses were formed to find out if there was significant difference on consumer's belief towards Amazon and Flipkart on the basis of different attributes. Wilcoxon signed rank test was used for testing of these hypotheses. Customer belief on importance of the different attributes was also collected through questionnaire. Mean value of importance and rating of attributes were put into Fishbein Multi-Attribute Attitude Model for further analysis. On the basis of secondary data the attributes as mentioned in Table1were identified. Attributes play a major role in decision making process as consumers evaluate and compare on basis of attribute before making purchase decision. It's not only the physical properties of a product but also the intangible criteria that defines product attributes. Customer not only value the physical features of products , very often they link attributes to the consequences of buying or using the product.From marketers perspective also, understanding attributes is important because that gives opportunity to marketers to set a brand image for themselves apart from competitors. It is very important for a marketer to understand how consumer make their purchasing decisions and what are the things they value in products or services so that they can develop on those attributes to meet out customers expectations.  As seen in the Table 2, there was significant difference in customer's in belief all the attributes between Amazon and Flipkart except for product quality. It was observed that consumer's belief on performance of different attributes was better for Amazon than Flipkart.

4.Findings
According to Multi-Attribute Analysis Using Fishbein Model, it was observed that the overall score of Amazon was substantially higher than Flipkart.. Three attribute which are product varieties, customer care support and return and refund services, consumers attitude towards Amazon was much better which gives a competitive advantage to Amazon over Flipkart. Quality and return and refund services are identified as the two most important attributes as per consumer's belief. Although Returns and refunds services is one of the most important attribute,belief of customers on this aspect towards Flipkart is not as good as Amazon. Flipkart should give priority to it so as to improve on it.

Conclusion
It is observed consumers of Patna have a better attitude towards Amazon than Flipkart. Flipkart needs to improvise on these aspects where it lags behind to keep in pace with its competitor. As consumer attitude can change over time, both of them need to keep focus on consumers believes and priorities.