The Impacts on Purchasing Processes duringa pandemic : A quantitative study how COVID-19 changed thepurchasing processes

Sammanfattning: Throughout the years there have been many pandemics, but none with the same impact and complications of which COVID-19 brought the world at the start of 2020. Previous research on behalf of this issue has been made but not with the specifics of what the authors want to accomplish with this research. The authors want to look at “How has COVID-19 impacted the purchasing process?”. The reasoning behind choosing this research question comes from the problems COVID-19 brought theworld when it came to consumerism. In other words, the purpose was to evaluate how consumers have adapted and changed their ways of making purchases. People got forced, from being in lockdown, to do most/all their shopping through the internet, and for some this was not an easy task. Certain issues were brought to attention with this in mind: Consumers stopped their sporadic purchases and only focused on what was only necessary, at the start of the pandemic consumers started to panic and stocked up on food and household supplies such as toiletries. This research delimits itself from two specific parts: the first one is that the authors wanted to only look at the consumer's perspective and not the retailers. Secondly the issue at hand is a worldwide phenomenon which is considered through the research but with the limitation of having Swedish consumers answering the survey that was sent out to gather information. Marketing philosophy encountered the greatest game changer in our time and foundations of concepts, theories and processes were changed. How the growth of online shopping has increased between chosen groups with the drastic changes within the purchasing processes. From 265 respondents to our survey we analyzed four hypotheses and evaluated how the purchasing process has been affected. We found that consumers agreed with our beliefs that the process has changed. Online shopping has increased since COVID-19 started, but not within a significant change between groups. Consumers were not comfortable purchasing expensive items online which resulted in a problem regarding COVID-19 restrictions.