Page 17 - ASBIRES-2017_Preceedings

Withanagamage & Wattegama
the literature gap in Sri Lankan context, the
objective of the study has been set as to
understand the e-Shopping behaviour among
Sri Lankan consumers and it is expected to
find their perceptions, affordability, and
trends towards e-Shopping. According to
Ragulan (2014), “Online marketing is like a
knife. You may cut multiple fruits and make
a perfect fruit salad or you may end up in
hurting yourself after all achieving nothing
but getting hurt”. Due to this reason many
firms are reluctant to deal with e-Commerce
through their businesses. Hence, the findings
of this study would be helpful to the
marketers to increase the motivation of
engaging in e-Commerce, thereby maximize
their profits.
2 LITREATURE REVIEW
According to World Stats (2016), 3,366
million people had been using the Internet
by December 2015. This indicates that 46.4
percent of the world population use the
Internet. The worldwide B2C sales via e-
Commerce were about more than 1.2 trillion
US Dollars in 2013. The current e-
Commerce statistics has stated that 40
percent of Internet users of the world are
engaging in e-Commerce. It means that
there are more than 1 billion online buyers
in the world today and it is continuously
growing (Statista, 2016).
Russia
India
Canada
South Korea
Germany
France
Japan
UK
US
China
0 500 1000 1500
2016 2015
Figure 1: B2C e-Commerce turnover (in
billion US dollars)
7
Source: e-commerce Europe (2016)
Figure 1 has shown that there are
several number of world’s largest B2C
markets and the e-Commerce earnings have
been increased over the two years in every
country. According to the annual report of
economic and social statistics of Sri Lanka
which was published in 2014, the Internet
usage among Sri Lankans has been
increased from 2005 to 2013 and the usage
has been rapidly increased from 2009
onwards (as shown in Figure 2).
2500000
2000000
1500000
1000000
500000
0
Figure 2: Internet usage among Sri lankans
Source: Economic and social statistics of Sri
Lanka (2014)
Sri Lanka has become one of the fastest
growing e-Shopping markets in Asia
(Sirimane, 2016). The annual consumer
sales in Sri Lanka is valued at about Rs. 300
billion and currently the online sales are 1
percent of it and it is expected to increase by
around 3 percent within three years of time
(Sirimane, 2016). The social media can be
used to attract the audience mostly in the
western province while
gossiplankanews.com, adaderana.lk,
Ikman.lk, hirunews.lk, and baiscopelk.com
and are the most popular local websites
among Sri Lankans (Rathnayake, 2016).
According to the Internet usage statistics in
Sri Lanka which were published in 2016,
Ikman.lk and eBay.com have been ranked as
the top ten e-Commerce websites in Sri
Lanka while global retailer like
th
Amazon.com stands at 12 position.