Impact of COVID-19 on Customer's Perception About Purchasing Digitizable Products

As the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic forces governments from all over the world to apply many restrictions and regulations, our lives and economies are affected tremendously. Thus, also the E-Commerce (EC) faces new challenges it must tackle to succeed during the current situation. Therefore, the paper presents a survey addressing customer's perception about purchasing digitizable products (DP) and how it might have changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For this reason, four research questions have been formulated. They are answered by considering the results of the survey which had 42 participants in total. The results indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the participant's perception about purchasing DP by boosting the EC and decreasing the commerce of traditional local stores. Furthermore, the participants clearly differentiate between all categories of DP by having different preferences for each that online retailers should carefully consider. Future work should continue focusing on the scope of this work by investigating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the customers' buying behavior regarding DP and all other kinds of products or services offered, as the presented results only provide brief information on trends possibly occurring.