The influence of macroenvironmental factors on online shopping and the use of BNPL

Sammanfattning: In the early days of e-commerce, countries took to the phenomenon at very different speeds. Researchers proved the most important factors for this to be propensity for trust and the perceived risk of online purchases. Today, the use of short-term, interest-free consumer credit, also known as ‘buy now, pay later’ (BNPL), is becoming increasingly popular. This concept, too, has gained very different footing between countries. There is a gap in the research on why, but use of short-term consumer credit offline has been proved to be related to people’s trust and attitude to risk. This study reviews several macro-environmental factors previously proven to be related to technology diffusion, risk and trust, and attempts to prove their respective impact on online shopping and the use of BNPL. Data on online shopping is collected from the Global Findex Database and includes 52 countries, while data on BNPL is collected from Swedish FinTech company Klarna and includes six countries. Out of ten macro-environmental factors examined, five showed a significant positive correlation to online shopping: individualism, long-term orientation, competitiveness, ease of doing business and political stability. Two cultural factors, individualism and uncertainty avoidance, showed a promising linear relationship with BNPL use, in the opposite sign of their respective hypothesis, although only significantly for individualism. Both these cultural dimensions are documented to affect risk behaviour. These results indicate that whatever perceived risk counteracts the diffusion of online shopping, drives the use of BNPL products. We reason that BNPL cancels some of the aspects of an online purchase proven to be perceived as risky, such as card information theft. Thus, high individualism and low uncertainty avoidance means people are less bothered by the risk of online shopping, and therefore less incentivised to mitigate them using BNPL. The main limitation of this study is the sample size of the market data on the use of BNPL, as well as the included countries being too similar in many aspects. The findings are useful for FinTech’s and e-commerce companies exploring new markets for expansion, and for policymakers attempting to regulate this emerging financial industry.