Investigating the Online Shopping Style of Sport Products from Virtual Networks and Online Stores

Nowadays, Internet has become a widespread context for business and a media for marketing. The purpose of this study was to investigate the online shopping style of sport products from virtual networks and online stores. The research follows a descriptive methodology and is of survey kind. The statistical population of the study was the members of Telegram Channels and Instagram pages of three stores namely Football Shop, Iran Sporter and Marial Spartan; 385 members of these channels and pages completed the questionnaire thoroughly. Data gathering tool was Lee (2012) questionnaire; the formal and content validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by 12 sport management specialists and reliability of the questionnaire was also obtained using Cronbach's alpha coefficient (0.89), indicating the appropriate reliability for questionnaire. Descriptive statistics was used for describing the demographic characteristics, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for the investigating normal distribution of the data, Topsis model for ranking the various shopping styles, and Manova test for comparing different types of shopping styles based on the demographic characteristics. The results showed that from the consumers' point of view, the quality component and the price were the most important items. Items such as impulse, loyalty, brand, recreation, confusion, fashion, and endorsement had a low priority. The results also showed that there is a significant difference between all components of shopping style of respondents based on the demographic variables including age, gender, marital state, education, and income.