Risk perception and attitude of Singaporeans : online shopping in Singapore

Abstract

There has been an increase in the number of online purchases made by Singaporeans as compared to the past decade despite the increasing number of various risks involved. This paper aims to find the perceived risks and risk attitudes of Singaporeans by looking into their attitudes and behaviors towards online shopping. We made reference to the paper “The perceived risks of shopping in Taiwan” (Pi & Sangruang, 2011) which focused on the perceived risks of Taiwanese who shop online. We then made changes and further extended the paper by looking into Singaporeans’ differing risk attitudes as well. The 5 main factors that we focused on and which may contribute to differences in their perceived risk are convenience risk, financial risk, performance risk, time risk, and psychological risk. Following, we divided each perceived risk into subgroups. We conducted a survey, with random respondents aged 15 and above. The research model was tested after we got the responses by using Principal Component Analysis and Factor Analysis, which are statistical approaches to find the relationship between the different factors contributing to consumers’ perception of risk. We found that Singaporeans are risk averse towards online shopping from the selected perceived risks and the Item Reservation Probability.