A Study of Customer Preference and Attitude towards Online Shopping In Bihar

Online marketing has gained huge popularity and importance all over the world. Considering the wide range of benefits it provides to marketers as well as customers, it has become one of the leading mediums of marketing. Both small as well as large-scale businesses gets opportunity to increase their sales in an effective way through online marketing. With the opportunities come the challenges also, which the marketers need to understand. The marketers need to figure out how they can use online marketing adequately for success of an organization. And something that is of paramount importance for successfully implementing online marketing is a good understanding of the customers. The marketer must know the demographic variables as well as choices of their target customers for making effective marketing strategies. Marketers ought to predict with utmost accuracy, the target customers buying preferences and their attitude on the basis of their demographic characteristics and also their buying intention. In this study attitude of customers of Bihar on the basis of their demographic variables like gender and age is determined. It is also tried to find out whether there is a relationship between attitude and buying intention of customers. Category of goods that consumers prefer to buy online in Bihar is also determined.


Introduction
Online marketing has opened up new scope and dimensions of marketing. With enormous popularity, it has become an important medium of marketing in India and across world. Due to its cost effectiveness and ease of operation, new businesses are getting inclined to do its marketing in an online mode. To do online marketing effectively, understanding customer demography is of utmost importance. Before a business try to break into the market, an understanding of the nature of the market and the characteristics of population is crucial. The more understanding that an organization have about its customers, the better personalized offers it can make. This will result in increasing brand affinity and loyalty and thereby a higher return on investment for their marketing efforts.

Purpose of the Study
For the growth of an organization, it is very important that it gets more and more business. And for this it is very obvious that the marketer understands the population characteristics very well. Especially for a marketer who is trying to foray into a new business it's very important for him to understand the attitude of target customer based on their demography like gender and age and he should also be having an understanding of the type of good the customers prefer to buy online so as to take a correct decision regarding the category of goods he would be selling online.

Objectives of the Study
1) To analyze customer attitude towards online shopping on the basis of gender 2) To analyze customer attitude towards online shopping on the basis of age 3) To examine if there is any relationship between hours spent on Internet and attitude towards online shopping. 4) To examine if there is any relationship between customer attitude towards online shopping and Online shopping intention 5) To find out the category of goods customer prefer to buy online.

Study Design
This is a descriptive research as it will be describing the characteristics of the population and will not focus on why the pattern exists. Quantitative data collection method is used which include survey emphasizing objective measurements and numerical analysis of data collected.

Data Collection
Both primary as well as secondary data was used for the study. Initially secondary data was collected from journals, books, website and after that a well-structured closed-ended questionnaire was prepared. The questionnaire was divided into 3 sections .The first one relate to the demography of the respondents, second related to the attitude and shopping intentions of customers and the last section included questions based on their preference related to different category of goods.

Sampling
The survey was conducted in different cities of Bihar. Non-probability convenience sampling method was adopted and the samples were drawn from 120 respondents.

Questionnaire Design
5-point Semantic Differential Scale was used. It is a type of rating scale, which is used for psychological measurement. It is used for determining attitudes, approaches and the perspective of respondent.

Data Analysis
Hypotheses were formulated and tested statistically H 01 : There is no significant difference between attitude of male and female towards online shopping H A1 : There is significant difference between attitude of male and female towards online shopping Mann-whitney U Test result The U-value is 1239 The Z-Score is 2.9219. Critical value for a twotailed test is z_c = 2.81, it is hence concluded that the null hypothesis is rejected.
Using the P-value approach: The p-value is p= 0.0034. The result is significant at p < .05. It is concluded that the null hypothesis is rejected.
Therefore, there is enough evidence to claim that the population median of differences is different than 0, at the 0.05 significance level.
Findings: Males have a better attitude towards online shopping than female There is no significant difference between attitude of customer towards online shopping in the age group under 25 and 25 to 44. The attitude of customer in the age group 45 and above is significantly different from the other two groups.
H 03 : There is no significant relationship between attitude of customers towards online shopping and hours spent on internet H A3 : There is significant relationship between attitude of customers towards online shopping and hours spent on internet (1) less than 1 hour a day (2) 1 to 4 hours a day (3) more than 4 hours a day Findings: There is significant difference between attitudes of customer towards online shopping based on the hours they spend on internet. The customers who spent more hours on internet have a better attitude towards online shopping.

Conclusion
It can be concluded that there is a significant effect of customer age and gender in online shopping. Younger generation and those who spend more time on internet are more keen to shop online as they are more well versed in using technology. It is also observed that customers from male group are more interested in online shopping than females. The study revealed that attitude and intention are strongly and positively correlated .Marketers should consider these population characteristics while deciding their marketing plans to get a competitive advantage over their competitors.