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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Article
Generation Y—Young Europeans’ Consumer Behavior
Author(s)
Magdalena Jaciow
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DOI:10.17265/1537-1514/2015.10.004
Affiliation(s)
Magdalena Jaciow, Ph.D., Department of Market and Consumption, University of Economics in Katowice, Katowice, Poland.
ABSTRACT
Generation Y is a group of young people, who draw on life to the full, with unlimited possibilities of choice. The segment of young consumers constitutes an attractive target market of many companies functioning on the Internet. The aim of paper is identification and comparison of e-consumers’ purchasing behaviors in selected European countries. The results present following aspects of online purchasing process: motives for online shopping, a way of collecting and sources of information about an offer, determinants of product selection, conditions for online shopping and commerce organizational forms on the Internet, and determinants of selection of a shopping place. The extensive objectives of report required narrowing its subject scope and spatial direct research. The subjects of the study were e-consumers aged from 18 to 25, doing online shopping. The study was conducted in 2012 in six ultimately selected European countries: France, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and Italy, by a random survey on a sample of 1,800 e-consumers. The thesis was made that the differences of psychographic features (resulting from a national culture) and living conditions (resulting from social-economic development of particular countries) of e-consumers do not significantly influence their purchasing behaviors on the Internet, thanks to which people may treat e-consumers from different European countries as a homogenous group of e-purchasers. However, when analyzing young consumers’ behaviors in the virtual scope (on the Internet), this paper may propose a thesis that regardless of a country and culture of origin, these behaviors are similar to each other. Young e-consumers “making a living” from the Internet on a daily basis, search for information in the same sources (www websites, in e-shops, and on Internet forum), in a similar way (e.g., using an Internet browser or a price comparer), and for the same reason (to compare prices of products).
KEYWORDS
generation Y, consumer behavior, purchased products, sources of information, online shopping
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References
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