An investigation of factors influencing online shopping behaviors in the context of China and Australia

Online shopping has gained much popularity over the past decade. Indeed, in a post-COVID world, online shopping is the only medium of shopping for many. A great deal of research effort has been devoted to understanding the factors that positively or negatively influence online shopping behavior of consumers. However, most of these influence relationships have been studied individually, and not how such factors interrelate with each other and thus the underlying complex driving and dependence relationships among those factors are unknown. Moreover, these underlying driving and dependence relationships among online shopping behavior factors can be highly dependent on the cultural context of the consumers. In this research we identify the key factors that have been shown to have influence on online shopping behavior from a rigorous review of literature. We then apply an Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) technique to find the underlying complex hierarchical relations of factors related to Australian and Chinese culture. We apply MICMAC analysis to find the driving and dependence power of these factors in context of these two cultures. We finally explain the differences and similarities found for Australian and Chinese culture with reference to Hofstede’s Cross Culture theory. Prominent findings include timeliness of delivery and order accuracy is considered having high dependence and driving power in the Australian context but has low driving and dependence power in Chinese context. Our findings will be beneficial for including better cultural context factors into future online shopping platform design.