Evaluating the Determinants of Customers’ Mobile Grocery Shopping Application (MGSA) Adoption during COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The study aims at determining the predictors of mobile grocery shopping applications (MGSAs) acceptance and their impact on behavioral intention to use MGSA during COVID-19 outbreaks. Based on the technology acceptance model and theory of planned behavior, we analyzed the influence of social distancing, fear of COVID-19, subjective norms, shopping attitudes, ease of use, usefulness on behavioral intention to use MGSAs. Data were collected from 565 users and analyzed with structured equation modeling (SEM) using SMART PLS 3 software. Findings depicted that shopping attitudes were predicted by subjective norms, ease of use, and usefulness. In contrast, behavioral intention is predicted by subjective norms, attitudes, ease of use, usefulness, fear of COVID-19, and social distancing. The study contributes to the extant literature incorporating fear of COVID-19 and social distancing as psychological and situational variables into the technology acceptance model and theory of planned behavior, which may guide the marketing practitioners to promote online sales in an unprecedented situation.

Keywords:

• Mobile grocery shopping applications (MGSA)
• fear of COVID-19
• social distance
• behavioral intention to use
• theory of planned behavior

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Science and Technology University, Gopalganj, Bangladesh for partial financial support to conduct this project successfully.

Declaration of interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Author’s contributions

This research developed and tested a holistic model integrating TAM and TPB with psychological aspects of COVID-19 (i.e., Fear of COVID-19) and a situational variable (i.e., social distancing) to identify the determinants of using mobile grocery shopping applications (MGSAs) in Bangladesh. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior study focused on the usage of MGSAs in an unprecedented situation. Moreover, the study expands the extant literature focusing on psychological aspects of COVID-19 (i.e., Fear of COVID-19) and contextual cue (i.e., social distance) to understand the usage of MGSAs in the COVID-19 pandemic.