Online food marketing: Its development, future, and reflections to Turkey

With the spread of virtual markets on the internet and the supermarket chains with physical stores including the multi-store concept in their business processes; The purchase of food products via the Internet will increase significantly from year to year. Businesses dominating the market will be multichannel supermarket chains that combine the concept of physical and online retailing. According to the reality of today, the purchase of food products on the internet is around 3% on average. According to the projections of 2024, the general opinion is that this ratio will reach 4.5% globally. The reason why this ratio is less than other electronic commerce categories is that fresh food products are perishable and consumers hesitate for this reason. In addition, consumers do not want to buy food products without the sensation of taste, smell and touch. Currently the online market industry volume in the top ten countries is 147.9 billion dollars, while the estimated figure for 2023 will be 347.9 billion dollars. For this reason, it has become an increasingly important issue for both businesses and consumers. The aim of this study to examine the issue of online food marketing point of view of consumers, and to evaluate measuring the perception of consumers in Turkey. The conceptual model of the study is based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The intentions and attitudes of the consumers, which constitute the purchasing behavior of the consumers, were evaluated by examining the sub-factors. In this study, a positivist method was adopted and an online survey was conducted in order to explore consumer behaviors in a certain period of time for exploratory purposes. The data collected from the questionnaire were examined and evaluated in terms of hypotheses formed in the light of the conceptual model. Significant relationships have been found between the factors that make up consumer perceptions and the behavior of online food purchase that has become a reality.