| dc.description.abstract | The growth and spread of internet with an extraordinary pace over the last few decades has
resulted in emergence of online purchasing of products and services. This study investigated
factors influencing online buying behaviour of Geothermal Development Company (GDC)
employees in Nakuru town, Kenya. GDC is a project based company with a mission of providing
steam to power generation of 810MW by 2016. The study proposed four objectives which were
to assess how perceived benefits, perceived risks, psychological factors and website design
influence online buying behaviour of Geothermal Development Company employees.
Theoretical framework that guided the study were Technological Acceptance Model (TAM) and
Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) which are relevant to this study and were operationalized
through a conceptual framework. The research design applied in this research was descriptive
survey. The target population for the study were employees of Geothermal Development
Company based in Nakuru town who were 732 in number. Systematic sampling was used to take
a sample of 110 employees. A closed ended survey questionnaire was administered to collect
primary data. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and Microsoft excel package was
used for data analysis and findings were presented in tables. The findings indicated that
perceived risk shared 39.94% of the variability of online buying behaviour of GDC employees.
Similar statistically significant correlation result was arrived at for psychological factors which
shared a variability of 28.73% with online buying behaviour. A medium positive relationship
between perceived benefits of online shopping and consumer online buying behavior was
established with a shared variability of 12.04%. Website design had a Pearson correlation
coefficient of r = 0.251 p (one-tailed) > 0.05 hence it was concluded that there was no
statistically significant relationship between website design and consumer online buying
behaviour. The study recommends that various risk-reducing strategies should be developed by
online retailers in addition to putting mechanisms in place to guarantee the quality of their
merchandise and create avenues of settling disputes. Another recommendation is that online
vendors should not give less priority to website design since consumers rarely focus on visual
design, site content, ordering and transaction procedure in making purchase decision via the
internet. | en_US |
