Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the consumption behavior of consumers more closely and efficient purchasing channels of domestic e-commerce buyers by specifically analyzing the relationship between demographics and channels that are used first to acquire purchasing information during e-commerce. Research design, data and methodology: Korean Media Panel Survey performs 17 cities and provinces nationwide, and 4,537 panel households (all household members aged 6 or older) are surveyed, and a household visit interview is conducted. Correspondence analysis, one of the popular multivariate techniques, is exploited to explore the association between priority channel for acquisition of information and demographics. Results: The findings show that the considered demographics are closely associated with the priority channel for acquisition of purchase information. In particular, 'searching for portal sites' are closely relevant to 'more than 5 million won', 'device & machine control assembly', 'graduate school or higher', and '40-59', while 'searching for online open market' is linked with college graduate and '20-39'. Conclusions: The substantial contribution of this work is that by analyzing the association between demographics and priority channel for acquisition of purchase information in e-commerce in South Korea, we can discern the segmentation standard factor for e-commerce market and advance the subdivided market.