ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic brought a paradigm shift in trade and business in both national and international context. Precautionary measures to avoid the disease; like lockdowns, social distancing, and prohibition on cross border trade caused significant damage to most of the businesses. However, the global E-commerce industry is one of the few for which this pandemic has acted as a boon. As for Bangladesh by mid-2020 the size of the E-commerce industry reached Taka 166 billion-an astonishing 30 times that of 2016. This study aims to construct a predictive model to analyse and predict consumer behaviour of online purchasing in Dhaka city of Bangladesh in this COVID-19 era. For the data set, interview on 200 participants were conducted to understand their approach to e-commerce businesses. To build the predictive model, binary outcome models like Probit and Logit models were selected to identify whether consumers will prefer to shop online after COVID-19 or not. The percentage of female consumers are 20% higher than male in overall online purchasing. Education level and income also indicate the same group. People with some specific health concerns like Diabetes, Respiratory Disease, MD, and Cancer are at higher risk and they have a higher chance to take precaution by staying at home more. As more of the participated interviewees fall in to age group of 25–31 years, limited number of them contained such disease. Both the models predicted that the participants are not willing to reduce online shopping in the future, which supports the argument that the pandemic substantially increased online shopping.
