Factors Associated to Online Shopping at the BoP Community in Rural Bangladesh

Online shopping is getting popular even in the rural areas of developing countries. However, few research has been conducted to identify the factors associated to online shopping by the poor villagers. Whereas people living at the bottom of the economic pyramid (BoP) has an aggregate purchase power which is a huge market and online shopping has the potentiality in reducing BoP penalty by removing unnecessary middlemen from the supply chain. In this research, we have conducted a field survey on 600 households in the western part of rural Bangladesh to find out current status of online shopping use by the BoP people and the demographic and behavioral factors associated with online shopping. Chi-square test of association and multi-variate logistic regression test have been performed to analyze data. Result shows that cell phone use, computer use, social media use, and mobile money transfer use have significant relationship in online shopping use at the BoP community. Keywords—Online shopping; BoP; demographic and behavioral factors; Bangladesh