Research and Decision Making.

Research and Decision Making

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
1. ANALYSIS OF BUSINESS PROBLEM................................................................................1
2. RESEARCH QUESTIONS......................................................................................................2
3. RESEARCH DESIGN.............................................................................................................2
4. KEY VARIABLES..................................................................................................................3
5. SAMPLE REQUIREMENTS & SAMPLING OPTIONS.......................................................4
6. ETHICAL ISSUES...................................................................................................................6
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................7
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................8

INTRODUCTION
Online shopping is highly influencing customers nowadays; shoppers are attracted
towards the facilities provided by online sellers (Farah et.al., 2018). This has negatively affected
retail outlets in terms of sales and profitability. The present research is a comparative study on
offline shoppers and online shoppers in Sydney. The research will identify the major factors
influencing customers to do online shopping rather than shopping at retail outlets.
1. ANALYSIS OF BUSINESS PROBLEM
Purchasing products or services over internet known as online shopping has gained high
popularity recently because people find it easy and convenient to shop from the comfort of their
office or home and also don’t have any trouble of moving shop to shop for searching products or
services of their choice (Brown & Ingene, 2019). Online shopping is a type of e-commerce that
helps in allowing consumers to buy products or services directly via virtual shop. On the other
hand, retail is a procedure of selling products or services to customers via multiple distribution
channels. Retail stores or an outlet is the most basic type of business. These may be small or big,
but they operate mostly with a same agenda as purchasing to sale (Singh & Dass, 2019). The
main issue raised in the present era is increasing online purchasing by shoppers have led to
closure of many retailers or outlets. Nowadays customers are no longer forced for choosing
between just a few options when looking to purchase products and services. Customers now
shops in a various ways such as visiting stores, checking store's website, reading reviews and
making price comparison online through their smart phones while making any purchase.
Retailers must make strategic and clear responses to the changing pattern of how consumers
make any purchase, which consists tactical decisions related to store locations and numbers.
They also require to fully integrating these physical stores along with their websites, smart phone
offerings & social media community. In order to retain customers retail outlets in Sydney needs
to attract customers mainly tourists through effective strategies such as promotional campaigns,
offers and creating attractive physical outlets (Rao & Kotian, 2018).
There are many factors affecting offline shopping or shop at outlets. These factors are as
below -
Lesser number of choices - There are very limited choices for customers when it comes to
offline shopping. The range of products and number of varieties are limited. There are
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sometimes when the stock is old and on sale or discounts. It simply means that in a retail
outlet or offline shop customers get a smaller number of choices as compared to online
shopping.
Time consuming - offline shopping is time consuming as customers need to go to different
shops to search for products they want (Azad, Meraj & Gupta, 2019). This often irritates the
customers as they waste a lot of time in searching for their desired goods or services.
Along with the above issues, shopkeepers in Sydney are facing several other problems
such as increasing costs of operations, unavailability of resources such as store locations etc.
After high investment retailers with outlets in Sydney are facing a huge loss as people are
shifting towards online shopping with a great pace.
2. RESEARCH QUESTIONS
 What are the significant differences between offline and online consumer groups in
Sydney?
 What are the factors that attracts consumer towards online shopping in Sydney?
3. RESEARCH DESIGN
In order to collect data related to formulated research questions there can be two major
options which can be used by the researcher, Quantitative and qualitative research design. A
Qualitative design is focused on forming answers to the how’s and whys of the phenomenon
within questions (Shaheen, 2018). This is the reason qualitative research is generally defined as
being subjective and findings are collected in a written format despite numerical. Quantitative
research design refers to the design of a research study which utilises quantitative research
methods (Riff et.al., 2019). Quantitative research design aims to discover how many individuals
act, feel and think in a way. Quantitative research consists large sample sizes, focusing on the
quantity of responses as opposed to obtaining more emotional or focused insight that is the
objective of qualitative research. In this study researcher will be using quantitative research
design to collect and analyse numerical data or statistics which can be used to develop precise
information based on responses by participants.
There are three major forms of quantitative research designs: Correlational, descriptive,
Experimental. The differences among these four types of research designs are the degree to
which variables are in control within each design (Ishtiaq, 2019).
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