Typology of consumers shopping online and a research

Today, consumer behavior constitutes the foundation of the marketing branch. Academicians conducting marketing research, business owners or managers consider consumer properties affecting consumer behavior while forming marketing strategies, thus they aim to develop special strategies directed to consumers. As in traditional shopping, consumer behavior in internet shopping exhibits differences based on consumer properties. Therefore, grouping consumers based on their differences, presenting personalized services and products based on evaluation of behavioral diversity, fulfilling expectations through suitable methods and increasing customer satisfaction provide competitive advantage to companies. In this study, it was aimed to draw a general online shopping consumer profile using the socio-demographic properties, internet usage frequencies, online shopping frequencies and the places where consumers prefer to shop online and then to form a typology of these consumers based on the factors affecting their shopping motivations. The risk perceived towards internet shopping, the perception of comfort provided by online shopping, the need for interaction in shopping, the perception of entertainment in shopping and the need for information and planning before shopping are the motivational factors used in this study. Three groups came out of the cluster analysis: "Internet-Shopping Oriented", "Undecided" and "Traditional-Shopping Oriented". These groups were evaluated and compared according to their properties and the products they preferred and then the hypotheses were tested using t-tests and variance analysis. With this study and the findings of the conducted research, it is aimed to contribute to the marketing literature as well as the research related to marketing applications. Keywords: Typology, Classification, Online Shopping, Consumer