COVID-19’s Effects on Turkish Online Retail Consumers’ Retail Website Visiting Behavior

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the economy on a global scale with its impacts on the way people work, socialize, shop and more. With many people started working remotely, and adopting self-quarantine like measures, the changes they make in their lives inevitably shaped a new normal where they change their daily habits, shopping included. This study aims to find out how the online shoppers’ online retailer website visits are affected by the revealed daily new cases, deaths, and recoveries from COVID-19 pandemic. Results of the study shows that there is a strong correlation, in general, between the daily online retailer website visit numbers and daily COVID-19 progression in Turkey between the dates of 10/04/2020, the day Turkish government first announced a curfew in all major cities, and 01/08/2020. Further, 28/06/2020 is identified as the start of the “normalization period” as it was the date President Erdoğan made it public that Turkey was to resume intra-country transportation, public transportation services, and public places were to re-open on 01/07/2020. When the data is split from the start of the normalization process, it was seen that the correlations still exist with some exceptions in pre-normalization and normalization periods within the studied dates. Also, three patterns that websites from the same online retail category follow are defined. The results suggest that the online retailer websites’ number of visits are correlated with the COVID-19 statistics revealed by the Turkish Ministry of Health; ergo the online consumers’ behavior is affected by COVID-19 pandemic.

Keywords

• Online Shopping
• Consumer Behavior
• E-Commerce
• Market Research
• COVID-19

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