Investigating Product Uncertainties in Online Shopping: Evidence from Kenya

The internet has become an important part of the many aspects of people’s daily lives such as work, study, entertainment and in form of electronic commerce, shopping. Electronic commerce is growing rapidly in Kenya. There are many successful business-to-business, business-to-customer and customer-to-customer online shopping companies in Kenya. As a consequence, competition between vendors is intense and, therefore, mitigating the negative effects of high product uncertainty is necessary requirement as it remains a biggest hindrance for success of the online shopping. The purpose of this research is to investigate how online product description, third party product assurance, customer service and website design mitigate the negative impact of high product uncertainty. A questionnaire with 28 items is designed to collect data from online customers. Using multiple regression analysis, the relationship between dependent variable (product uncertainty) and independent variables such as product description, third party assurance, website design and customer service is tested. The result shows that all the independent variables are negatively correlated with dependent variable, which means that product description, third party assurance, website design and customer service can be used by online vendors to lessen the problem of product uncertainty in online markets.