Role of E-shopping Management Strategy in Urban Environment

Abstract

Considering rapid growth and migration, higher accumulation of communities along with the high number of shopping trips in mega cities such as Tehran brings environmental consequences like excessive amounts of energy use, air pollution and massive urban congestions in all urban trips ending to shopping areas. The present study has been performed in Tehran, capital of Iran in 2009-2010. With the advancement of information, communication technology great access to the electronic devices such as internet, telephone and cell-phone had showed a remarkable increase. Moreover, as a result, the governmental support for elimination or modification of trips through application of tele-presence in various activities has been also developed. The study has investigated the willingness of people in changing their shopping habit from physical to electronic form. A comprehensive questionnaire was designed based on various demographical, geographical and technological competences. For this purpose, final data were collected from 3580 respondents including customers, sellers and governmental sectors in order to achieve the present situation of e-shopping activity in Tehran. Furthermore, cluster analysis were performed and the results showed a significant relationship between eshopping activities and demographic elements such as; income, education, occupation, marital status. Besides, e-shopping activities have a strong correlation with geographic distributions like distance and time to shopping areas as well as technological competence such as time spent, working, browsing on the net plus the mode of connection. Finally, in order to find out e-shopping management strategy in Tehran, the SWOT analysis along with QSPM and SPACE matrices were performed. In this regard, internal and external factors were gained 3.03 and 2.99, respectively. Subsequently, 22 strategies were developed and the scores of each strategy were defined. Space matrix was also indicated that the e-shopping strategy grows to suggested competitive strategy type.