Abstract
The appearance of the internet has changed consumers’ consumption habit from traditional store shopping to online shopping. Because consumers spend more money on internet these days, scholars began to research on issues related to this new consumption behavior. However, we found that most existing literature in Taiwan only focus on the online shopping behavior for a small group of consumers, so their findings cannot explain the phenomenon of overall online shoppers in Taiwan. Therefore, this study aims to examine the online shopping behavior based on the island wide data drawn from the “Digital Opportunity Survey for Individuals and Household.” Our empirical approach applies the Heckman’s two-stage procedure. We select the years 2010, 2012 and 2016 to study, according to the different stages of the development of online shopping market, in order to understand the difference in factors that affect the amount of online shopping during this three years. We consider three models that contain different network usage related variables. In addition, we also discuss human capital variables and work-related variables. The results indicate that consumers who have used internet for a longer time or make better use of web resources tend to have higher amount of online shopping. Additionally, people who have higher income spend more money on internet. Males also spend more money than females on online shopping. Finally, online purchasing power of the prime-aged people are better than that of teenage and old-aged people.