a framework for identifying and prioritizing factors affecting customers’ online shopping behavior in iran

the purpose of this study is identifying effective factors which make customers shop online in iran and investigating the importance of discovered factors in online customers’ decision. in the identifying phase, to discover the factors affecting online shopping behavior of customers in iran, the derived reference model summarizing antecedents of online shopping proposed by change et al. was used as basis. as the antecedents collected in change et al. model are taken from different studies performed in different contexts, it was mandatory to extract the effective factors in iran context. solicitation of the factors is done through expert judgment methodology. the result is the set of localized antecedents of customers’ online shopping behavior in iran. in the second phase, the importance of identified factors was investigated via analytical hierarchy process (ahp). the hierarchic structure needed in ahp was achieved based on categories of change et al. model and the elicited factors in identifying phase. to examine the importance of identified factor thoroughly from different perspective, online customers, virtual store managers and academic experts were contributed in this investigation. an online survey based on pair-wise comparison of ahp was designed. 220 online customers, 9 virtual store managers and 10 academic experts judged the relative importance of each criteria in online shopping hierarchy. to obtain aggregated prioritization, representative of three corresponding groups preferences and not losing the preferences of each of decision makers, two level of aggregation utilized based on techniques of group analytical hierarchy process. the first step of aggregation was performed inside each group of decision makers by applying aggregating individual judgments (aij). in the second step, overall preferences achieved through aggregating the relative and absolute importance (local and global rating) of counterpart nodes in three online shopping hierarchies. the results of aggregation enabled us to discuss the importance of online shopping antecedents according to the three groups of decision makers. furthermore, it facilitates comparing the preferences of three groups. at the end the overall prioritization of localized antecedents of online shopping is proposed that can improves our understanding of iranian online customer behavior.