Online Shopping–Attitudinal Disparities On Ordering/Buying Goods And Services For Private Use At The Level Of Eu-Member States Before The Covid-19 Pandemic

The Covid19 pandemic, the phenomenon that will undoubtedly define the year 2020 by it's general impact on our socio-economical life, has had a major impact on the behavior of the population in terms of online shopping, too, because it was almost the only safe way for buying goods and services for personal use during the alert or emergency periods. Many skeptic consumers in the use of this way of shopping have passed the previously perceived barriers regarding buying/ordering over the Internet and had changed their negative attitude, and hade accepted it as only one possibility to safe shopping. Even if, in absence of recent certain dates for online shopping dimensions during the current coronavirus pandemic, interesting changes in individual online shopping behavior are expected because of the lockdown in traditional commerce by social distancing restrictions for the consumers under the pandemic which made that the traditional barriers of online shopping to falling-down. The e-commerce has now a great chance to grow as a healthy safe solution to buy goods and services for private use, even if many authors consider that the attitude is closely related to the perception and behavior manifested, a stability characteristic being the result of a long time. In order with a future analuysis of these changes in individual attitude on online shopping, this study aims to analyse the situation before the pandemic, loking for negative attitudinal disparities at the level of European Union Member States (excepting United Kingdom), based on Eurostat data for the year 2019. In this regard was performed hierchical cluster analysis with IBM SPSS v.20 statistical software. The profiles of groups of countries are defined for the end of the year 2019 and the expected changes under the impact of coronavirus pandemic are identified for several countries.