ROPO in Apparel: Unraveling the Impact of Online Research on Offline Purchase Behavior

Abstract

Due to the advent of internet, online shopping has become inevitable part of our life. Online shopping trend has strongly changed the consumer behavior. There are some typical kind of buyers who explore online shopping sites to acquire newest updates about the products they want to buy and finally they may end up buying it from offline stores. This shift in buying behavior is known as ROPO effect. “ROPO” stands for “Research Online Purchase Offline.” ROPO is the recent trend in purchasing behavior, where a prospective consumer explores the internet to acquire product related information and then purchases the item in a physical store. Although, consumers can research all products virtually prior to making a purchase offline, the products like Apparel, Footwear, Electronic items, healthcare items have a stronger impact because of ROPO effect. At this backdrop, the present study is an analysis of ROPO effect on consumer buying behavior of   apparels. The study attempts to identify why consumers’ want to purchase from offline stores inspite of exploring various online shopping sites. The required primary data for the study has been collected from respondents who have involved in both online and offline shopping. A sample of 200 respondents has been chosen based on Convenience sampling. The study found that e-commerce wave has not fully hit the apparel industry.