Digital Resistance during COVID-19: Customer Acceptance of Contactless Purchasing

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated the shift of work and life from the physical to a more digital format. In order to both survive and thrive, companies have integrated more digital-enabled elements into their businesses to facilitate resilience, often by avoiding potential close physical contact. Following Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM), this paper builds a workflow management system for contactless digital resilience when customers are purchasing in a store. Customer behavior, in coping with digital resilience against COVID-19, is illustrated and is empirically tested, using a derivative model in which the proposed constructs are from classical theories. Data was collected from individual customers via the Internet, and 247 completed questionnaires were examined by partial least squares (PLS) modeling.

The findings show that response costs have a positive significant effect on customers’ behavioral intention to adopt digital resilience measures, while self-efficacy plays a negative role on customers’ behavioral intentions. The findings reveal that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, customers are more concerned about health issues and put more effort into the deployment of digital resilience to mitigate the consequences of the virus. These results contribute to management information systems, customer behavior research, and design science methodology by emphasizing that, even beyond the performance of technology itself, another factor (the health issue) can play the key role in customers’ acceptance of digital resilience.