Master of Science in Economics and Administration, International Business

The main purpose of this study was to identify and examine the influence of different factors towards online buying frequency. In addition the introduction of the Electronic Commerce as a major prerequisite for this study was focused. Furthermore the purpose was to examine the influence of demographics, customer classification, transaction costs, personality and emotion among Finnish and German students’ online buying frequency. Hypotheses were derived from the theory and have been examined in the empirical part of the study. A cross-country survey was conducted to examine the hypotheses. The examination was done in a quantitative way and a deductive approach has been used. The survey consisted of 27 questions and was divided into five parts. The first part included demographic data and was followed by four others concerning customer classification, transaction costs, personality, and emotions. The data, consisting of 205 students, was analysed with SPSS 16.0 software for MAC using Pearson product-moment correlation and an independent-samples t-test. The results indicated that 4 hypotheses were accepted and 5 were denied. The findings showed that the selected variables have an influence on the frequency of online buying among students. It can be said that only age, gender, uncertainty, recreational shopper, conscientiousness, and neuroticism showed a significant correlation with the dependent variable. This leads towards 4 accepted hypotheses (age, gender, uncertainty, personality) and 5 hypotheses, which were denied (income, purchase horizon, shopping orientation, asset specificity, emotion). Furthermore despite the factors emotion, gender, and income the two groups showed no significant difference.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format