E-shopping: An Analysis of the Uses and Gratifications Theory

The Internet has experienced an exponential growth in the number of users and has created enormous increases in its marketing and communication applications during a considerably short period of time. Although both scholars and practitioners have jointly acknowledged the capabilities of the Internet as a marketing tool that offers great potentials and advantages, there remains a scarcity of knowledge pertaining to the motivations for using the Internet and associated online consumer behaviours in more web-specific scenarios. The uses and gratifications theory (U&G) provides a theoretical grounding and an avenue to further understand consumers’ attitude and intention of using the Internet as a shopping channel from a media perspective. While most of the studies done on the U&G in the Internet are situated in American and European contexts, this paper considers the U&G structure of online shoppers in the Asian context (more specifically, in Malaysia). More specifically, this study attempts to shed some light on how consumers form their attitude and online shopping intention based on the uses and gratifications structure to the existing literature and managerial implications for entrepreneurs and marketers of electronic businesses on how best to serve and attract consumers to shop online via the management of online shopping technologies.