Analysis and Evaluation of Iranian Customer Decision Making Styles from the Perspective of Online Purchase Behavior

The dramatic increase of Internet usage for the purchasing and ordering goods or services in Iran provides new challenges for researchers and managers to understand consumer behavior on these fastest growing e-commerce businesses. As one of the factors influencing consumers purchase behavior, decision-making styles are crucial for understanding consumer shopping behavior and for developing successful marketing strategies. The purpose of this research is to better understand Iranian online shoppers by investigating their decision-making style and exploring the relationships between their decision-making characteristics and their online shopping behavior. Consumer Style Inventory (CSI) developed by Sproles and Kendall (1986) was adopted as a theoretical background of this study, In order to understand consumers’ shopping orientation. Despite extensive research regarding consumer decision making styles, almost no attention has been paid to understand Iranian consumers as online shoppers. This research intends to fill the identified gap by implementing factor analysis and correlation matrix. The result shows that there are differences in purchasing behavior between explored styles of consumer. The results also demonstrated that some of the characteristics of the Consumer Style Inventory are related to the online purchase behavior. The conclusion of this research provides information for managers of shopping websites about consumer purchasing decisions based on the Consumer Styles Inventory (CSI).