Key Motivators for Iranian E-shopping: a Neural Networks Based Approach

There has been a significant growth in Internet shopping over the last few years in Iran. However, there is a little awareness of the effective factors which attract consumers to purchase online. It has been predicted that the city of Isfahan in Iran will experience a sharp increase in the Internet usage in the next decade. However, the factors affect the local eshopping of different types of products and the demographic characteristics of the local Internet consumers have received a little direct research so far. The present study aims to consider the effective factors on consumer e-shopping behavior and the role of each personal characteristic on these factors for different types of products. The data were obtained from 412 volunteers who have had the Internet shopping experience, and were analyzed using MLP neural networks and logistic regression per product. Then, after comparing the accuracy of these methods, the most essential factors which motivate the consumers to buy online were determined by a trained neural network. Finally, a regression analysis was performed to assess the significant difference between variables of each demographic characteristic per factor.