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A still-stirring mouse
Poll finds every day's the season for online shopping

Online shopping: no looking for a parking spot, no crowded stores, no rude store clerks, no waiting for wrapping. It's taking all the fun out of Christmas. - Jim Mullen's Hot Sheet, Entertainment Weekly, December 8

By Hope Green

Two years ago, dot-com businesses were the darlings of Wall Street investors. Every venture capitalist and stockpicker wanted to cash in on this revolutionary shopping method, which allows pajama-clad consumers to click and point their way through an array of discounted merchandise.

Michael Elasmar, COM associate professor and director of the Communication Research Center. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

Now, although hardly a day goes by without another headline about a dot-com failure and its resulting layoffs, a soon-to-be-published study of Massachusetts consumers by Boston University's Communication Research Center (CRC) could add holiday cheer for Internet retailers. Preliminary results of the telephone survey, which polled 836 residents over 18 years old in early November, show that 70 percent of Massachusetts Internet users have already made an online purchase at least once. And many who have never shopped online say they intend to try it soon.

"People seem to be optimistic about the prospects that online shopping offers them," says Michael Elasmar, director of the CRC and an associate professor at the College of Communication. "They're willing to do it again, which means they're not dissatisfied."

Women get connected

As anticipated, respondents most frequently cited a desire for convenience and value as influencing their decision to shop on the Web. But Elasmar, who is still analyzing the data, has already noticed one surprising result: while overall there is no difference in the frequency of online shopping between men and women, among those respondents who have been using the Internet for a year or less, female shoppers predominate.

"This leads us to believe that in Massachusetts, a lot of women are getting onto the Internet for the sole purpose of shopping online," Elasmar says. "If shopping is what draws them in, they might eventually use the Web for gathering medical information or other material that might not otherwise be available to them. And they might end up benefiting from it."

Household income is an important factor in determining who shops online. A greater proportion of survey respondents earning over $50,000 said they make purchases electronically than do those in lower income brackets. The largest categories of products they are buying include books, clothing, airline tickets, music CDs, and videos.

Bellwether state

The CRC, established in 1959, was a pioneer in studying the effects of television on children and in measuring voter intentions. The Internet survey follows on the heels of another CRC project, in which Massachusetts residents were polled on their use of direct-broadcast satellite television in place of cable.

Probably no other nationwide survey, Elasmar says, has grilled online shoppers in as much depth as the CRC has done in Massachusetts - a state with a highly computer literate population.

"Most surveys of this nature are conducted on behalf of large corporations and the results are kept secret," he says, "whereas we're doing it for social science, to learn more about the adoption of technological innovations by consumers. Since Massachusetts is a leading state with respect to income and technological orientation, these findings are a glimpse of things to come in the rest of the country."

Elasmar does not see the demise of major dot-com companies such as Furniture.com and the delivery service Streamline.com as signs that Web business is a fad that's fading.

"In any new business, there's going to be a period when money is being lost," he says.

"Those Web retailers who have the deepest pockets and the strongest nerves to stay in the market are going to end up reaping the benefits of operating with less competition, because all the others with weak nerves will have pulled out."

8 December 2000
Boston University
Office of University Relations