Factors Influencing the Sustainability of Online Food Delivery App During Lockdown

Abstract

Online food delivery (OFD) apps have gained popularity in the recent years with the advent
of technology where people adapting to online channels for purchase because of the convenience
offered. During the recent pandemic, lockdown was implemented in India with an aim to control the
spread of the infection. As a result of the restricted movement there was a surge in the demand for
among the consumers towards online ordering. However, when it came to OFD the consumers became
more sceptical because of the risk and exposure associated to it. This resulted in an increasing level of
hygiene among the users and had a paradigm shift in the perception towards OFD. Hence there was a
requirement to reiterate and study the factors that influences customer decision making when it came
to OFD as those research works carried out earlier stand obsolete because of the permanent change in
the consumer behaviour. The fundamental purpose of the research is to identify factor influencing the
choice of OFD during the lockdown in context to India through exploratory factory analysis which
would enable OFD service provider to make strategic decisions based on customer perceived value.
The analysis uses a set of twenty variables using a sample of 215 samples and principal component
analysis was applied to extract the minimum factor contributing to the maximum number of explained
variance. During the analysis three variables were dropped as it failed to explain the variance of the
variable by the factor. This would give a reduced set of uncorrelated latent variables using the linear
combination of the original variables. The study was concluded by identifying four factors that
classified the seventeen variables which was pertained to as convenience, information provided,
control & security and quality & hygiene.