IMPACT OF COVID-19 PANDEMIC ON ECOMMERCE AND ONLINE SHOPPING BEHAVIOUR AMONG STUDENTS OF HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTION (HEI)

The trend of online shopping has increasingly replaced offline shopping, even nowadays, due to how rapid the growth is currently. Being introduced as a new type of buying pattern, Ecommerce has been adopted on a global scale by businesses nowadays, aiming to reach more online consumers throughout the world. Nevertheless, this shopping method is still active in the local community, especially for the twenties that show high reliance on it. It can be seen from the increasing rate of online transactions made by university students. This study mainly aims to study the relationship between online shopping via e-commerce and higher education institutions (HEI) students’ behaviours as to learn more about the impact of online shopping behaviours,. Thus, a questionnaire survey as research design is applied and distributed among university students who are currently pursuing their studies at Tunku Abdul Rahman University College (TARUC) Pahang Branch, Malaysia (as a case study for this research work). The questionnaire consists of two parts, Part A is the demographic information with six questions and Part B is online shopping-related questions with a total of 18 questions measured with 5-Likert-scale. Among these HEI students who were the sample of this study, the questionnaires distributed were considered valid to be analysed and proved the hypothesis. All the data collected were then analysed using GNU PSPP Version 3. Afterward, the Bivariate Correlation is implemented to analyse data for hypothesis testing. The findings of this study have analysed and revealed the weak correlation between the demographic information (gender, age, race, family income and employment status) and online shopping factors. However, the online shopping factor does greatly impact the consumers’ shopping behaviours and shopping impacts, implying the more convenient the e-commerce platform, the more acceptable the ecommerce platform among consumers, which has shown the positive impact of shopping behaviour during COVID-19 pandemic.