Perceived health risk, online retail ethics, and consumer behavior within online shopping during the covid-19 pandemic

The risk of virus contracting during the COVID-19 pandemic has changed consumer preference for online shopping to meet their daily needs than shopping in brick-andmortar stores. Online shopping presents a different environment, atmosphere, and experience. The possibility of ethical violations is higher during online than face-toface transactions. Therefore, this study was conducted to investigate the influence of perceived health risk and customer perception of online retail ethics on consumer online shopping behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic, involving seven variables, namely perceived health risk, security, privacy, non-deception, reliability fulfillment, service recovery, and online shopping behavior. The data were collected through an online survey by employing the purposive sampling technique to a consumer who has shopped online during the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia. 315 valid responses were obtained and analyzed through quantitative method using SEM-Amos. The results showed that perceived health risk and four variables of online retail ethics including security, privacy, reliability fulfillment, and service recovery affected online shopping behavior. Meanwhile, non-deception was found to have an insignificant effect. The coefficient value proved perceived health risk to be more dominant in influencing online shopping behavior than the variables of online retail ethics. Thus, consumers pay more concern for their health during online shopping. However, positive consumer perceptions of the behavior of online retail websites in providing services also can encourage consumers to shop online during this pandemic. © Yuniarti Fihartini, Arief Helmi, Meydia Hassan, Yevis Marty Oesman, 2021.


INTRODUCTION
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the economy, regional and global policies, and social behavior of people. The increasing spread of the virus to different parts of the world starting from December 2019 has led to its labeling as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020, and the call for countries to take urgent and aggressive actions in response. Therefore, quarantine, as well as social and economic isolation, was implemented in several countries, regions, and different economic sectors to curb its further spread (Diele-Viegas & Pereira, 2020) The Indonesian National Committee for Handling COVID-19 and Economic Recovery reported that the number of COVID-19 cases in Indonesia increased every month from March to December 2020, as observed in 1,528 confirmed cases, 81 recovered, and 136 death recorded in March, and increment to 743,198 confirmed cases, 611,097 recovered, and 22,138 deaths in December. The Indonesian govern-ment therefore limited activities in the country to curb the spread of the virus through the "Large-Scale Social Restriction Policy" implemented in several regions starting from March 2020. This policy hampered human interaction and movement and disrupted economic activity. This further affected people's physical activities and daily behavior in the form of a shift from offline to online practices such as working, studying, and worshiping from home. This shows health and safety are the main concerns of the people in recent times.
The consumption pattern of people also changed due to the need to follow the governmental advice to stay at home and minimize physical contact to maintain personal and family health and cut the chain of the spread of the virus during the pandemic. This is observed from their shift from the conventional shopping method, which involves directly visiting shops, to the search for information and purchases of products and services online through electronic devices connected to the Internet. Following the data reported by Exabytes, a hosting service provider company in Indonesia through a written statement by Tirto.id, the number of e-commerce subscribers has increased by 38.3 % during the COVID-19 pandemic from January to July 2020. The report on "Big Data Overview of the Impact of COVID-19 2020" compiled by the Indonesian Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS) showed that online sales jumped sharply compared to sales in early 2020 as indicated by the 320% increment in March 2020 followed by a sharper increase to 480% in April 2020. Payment System Policy Department of Bank Indonesia (BI) also stated that e-commerce transactions increased by 26 % with the daily transactions increased to IDR 4.8 million during this pandemic. The most purchased items were recorded to be food and beverage products, clothing products, sports equipment, medical devices, communication equipment, cosmetics, household supplies, and educational equipment.
People consider shopping online as a safer alternative to prevent the virus during this period of a pandemic than at a physical store. Meanwhile, online shopping presents a different environment, atmosphere, and experiences when compared to offline shopping, even for identical products (Lu et al., 2013). There is a possibility of experiencing more ethical violations during online than offline transactions (Citera et al., 2005) and several online retail practices have been discovered to be violating consumer rights. This presents the biggest challenge for consumers considering transactions using online platforms, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this study was conducted to investigate the effect of perceived health risk and customer perception of online retail ethics on consumer online shopping behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic.  (2013) determined some risks considered to have a significant influence on consumer behavior in online purchases, such as financial, product, convenience, health, quality, time, delivery, after-sale, performance, psychological, social, and privacy risks. Zhang et al. (2012) also highlighted five out of these risks including those associated with health, quality, time, delivery, and after-sale to be the most dominant.

LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESES DEVELOPMENT
In the current pandemic situation, contracting the virus is a big threat to societies. This study, however, focused on health as a variable for perceived health risk. Perceived health risk is often referred to as perceived likelihood and vulnerability to becoming sick or a person's vulnerability to contracting a disease and its severity (Brewer et al., 2004;Brewer & Fazekas, 2007). The higher a person perception of the vulnerability and severity of a disease, the higher the probability for a person behavior to mitigate the risk of contractions (Chapman & Skinner, 2008). Meanwhile, Salem and Md Nor (2020) stated that the perceived health risk as a person perception of the potential health hazards is likely to be experienced while shopping physically at malls and stores during the pandemic. Referring to Salem and Md Nor (2020), in this study perceived health risk was defined as the danger of contracting the virus when visiting malls and shops during this pandemic.
Cone Health (2020) proposed several ways to prevent the spread of the virus such as maintaining social distancing, washing hands, avoiding touching the face, nose, eyes, or mouth, and staying at home. In the context of decision-making, people naturally consider options with lower risks. Social distancing and staying at home have been discovered to be an action that deliberately reduces close physical contact with people in crowded places such as malls and shops to prevent the potential transmission of the virus to families and communities during this pandemic. Therefore, the use of e-commerce is considered to have a lower risk when compared to other shopping methods during this period.
Online shopping has a different environment, atmosphere, and experiences compared to offline shopping (Lu et al., 2013). Consumers in brickand-mortar stores touch and feel the product to be bought first-hand while online shopping requires interacting in a virtual space consisting of a technical interface instead of the normal employees in a physical space. This means online buyers cannot inspect physically their potential purchases. The assessment and evaluation of the product attributes are limited to the information presented by the seller on the website. Therefore, consumers are faced with uncertainty and worry mainly associated with the ethics of online retail outlets in fulfilling their services. Citera et al. (2005) showed higher possibility of ethical violations during online than face-to-face transactions. Several unethical practices by online retailers have been discovered, such as false testimonials, persuasive but deceptive advertisements, images or photos not in accordance with the original product, lack of information disclosure or product information on the website, mismatches of goods sent with consumer expectations, delivery of damaged goods because of wrong packaging, fraudulent acts where sellers do not send products paid for by consumers, credit card crimes, and rampant spamming actions to send online catalogs via buyer email, which is considered intrusive to the privacy.
Roman (2007) focused on the ethics of online retailing, and described customer perception regarding online retail ethics (CPEOR) as "a consumer perceptions about the integrity and responsibility of the company (behind the website) in its attempt to deal with consumers in a secure, confidential, fair and honest manner that ultimately protects consumers' interests" (p. 134). identified several ethical problems in the context of B2B e-commerce, and these were used to form the seven dimensions including privacy, security, non-deception, reliability, service recovery, shared value, and communication in the BPSE model.
These findings were used in this study to formulate the five dimensions to measure customer perception ethics of online retail, which consist of security, privacy, non-deception, fulfillment reliability, and service recovery. 5. Service recovery is the consumer perception of online retail companies' fairness in recovery efforts regarding actions used as a response to their service failure (Grönroos, 1998).
The perspectives of parties involved in online trading regarding ethical behavior are very complex and those are important to consumer behavior. Meanwhile, this pandemic requires deliberate restraint of physical contact, and online shopping has been discovered by people to be a safer way to avoid the spread of the virus. This, therefore, means the need to protect transaction security, maintain the confidentiality of information, act fairly and honestly, and protect consumers in the form of on-line retailers' ethical behavior affecting customer behavior in using the platform at this period.
It is proved that customer perception towards online retail ethics affects attitude to the website, trust in the website, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, word-of-mouth, revisit intention, and repurchase intention ( Based on the literature review, the objective of the study is to investigate the effect of perceived health risk and customer perception of online retail ethics involving security, privacy, non-deception, reliability fulfillment, and service recovery on customer behavior during online shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic especially in the Indonesian context. In line with the objective of this study, the following hypotheses are therefore proposed (Figure 1): H1: The higher perceived health risk of shopping in brick-and-mortar stores has a positive effect on consumer behavior in online shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic.
H2a: Consumer perception of security of online shopping has a positive effect on customer behavior in online shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic.
H2b: Consumer perception of privacy of online shopping has a positive effect on consumer behavior in online shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic.
H2c: Consumer perception of non-deception of online shopping has a positive effect on consumer behavior in online shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic.
H2d: Consumer perception of reliability fulfilment of online shopping has a positive effect on consumer behavior in online shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic.
H2e: Consumer perception of service recovery of online shopping has a positive effect on consumer behavior in online shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic.

METHODOLOGY
This study used a questionnaire as the instrument to test the proposed hypotheses. It was developed by adapting the validated scales from the previous literature to the current context. The question- Online shopping behavior naire consists of two main parts. The first one is designed to cover socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents such as gender, age, employment status, monthly expenditure, and intensity of online shopping during the pandemic. The second one focuses on the question items related to the construct proposed in the model and measured using a five-point Likert scale ranging from "strongly disagree" (1) to "strongly agree" (5).
The question items were checked by 10 respondents after the questionnaire was compiled, and feedback was provided on the wordings of the sentences, which led to small changes. Preliminary pilot testing of the modified questionnaires was conducted among 50 respondents. The questionnaire was distributed randomly online using a purposive sampling technique, with the focus on respondents who have shopped online during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is important to ensure that the questionnaire items were valid and reliable.
The results of preliminary testing of the questionnaire were evaluated using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) for the validity and determined using Cronbach's alpha for the reliability of the research instrument through SPSS. The validity was tested to ensure the question items can be used to measure a concept precisely and correctly, and those with high validity are believed to have the ability to explain the research problem according to actual circumstances or events. Hair et al. (2010) considered an item to be valid when its factor loading is higher than 0.70. Meanwhile, the reliability was tested to ensure the question items show the same degree of precision, accuracy, stability, or consistency when measured at different times (Sekaran & Bougie, 2016), and an item is considered reliable when the lower bound for the Cronbach's alpha coefficient is 0.70 (Hair et al., 2010). All the question items used in this study met the validity and reliability criteria by having factor loading higher than 0.70 and a reliability scale higher than 0.80. Therefore, all the final 29 items obtained from the pilot test were used as indicator variables in this study as shown in the questionnaire presented in Appendix A.
Online surveys usually take a longer period for data collection, but in this study, the time was limited to one week due to the rapidly changing na-

RESULTS
The measurement model analysis was conducted to ensure the validity and reliability of data before the structural model was evaluated. The data were tested using Fornell and Larcker (1981) criteria. Thus, the loadings of individual items, the composite reliabilities (CRs) of each construct, and the average variance extracted (AVE) were measured. The loadings of individual items are required to be at least 0.7 for the data to be considered valid, CR has a recommended threshold of 0.8, and the AVE is expected not to be less than 0.5. The analysis showed that 2 items of the privacy indicator did not meet the criteria for the loadings of individual items and they were deleted, after which the CR and AVE verified the data met the established criteria. Therefore, it was concluded that the data in this study have sufficient levels of convergent validity and reliability in reflecting the construct as shown in Table 2.
The next step after determining the validity and reliability of the measurements was to evaluate the structural model. , where GFI, NFI, and CFI were higher than 0.9, AGFI was higher than 0.8, and RMSEA was lower than 0.08 to indicate a sufficient fit between the model and the data observed in this study. Table 3 showed that perceived health risk had a statistically positive significant effect on online shopping behavior (β = 0.707, p < 0.001), therefore, H1 is accepted. Moreover, the four hypotheses H2a, H2b, H2d, and H2e are also accepted with security (β = 0.170, p <0.001), privacy (β = 0.152, p < 0.001), reliability fulfilment (β = 0.218, p < 0.001), and service recovery (β = 0.139, p < 0.05) observed to have a statistically positive effect on online shopping behavior. Meanwhile, H2c is not supported and this means that non-deception did not have a statistically positive effect (β = 0.079, p > 0.05).

DISCUSSION
This study assessed perceived health risk, online retail ethics, and online shopping behavior during this COVID-19 pandemic with the main objective of providing a better understanding of these concepts in Indonesian. The process, however, involved formulating several variables for perceived health risk and five for online retail ethics, including security, privacy, non-deception, reliability fulfillment, and service recovery.
The results showed that perceived health risk has an important role in influencing consumer behavior in online shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic. This was based on the potential to contract the virus when shopping physically in malls and shops and the feeling that online shopping can minimize this direct physical contact with subsequent prevention of the virus spread. This makes the consumers feel more secure and calmer due to the lower potential health risks provided by online shopping during the pandemic in comparison to malls and physical stores. Therefore, high perceived health risks in physical shopping motivated consumers to shop online during the COVID-19 pandemic. This finding is, however, different from the results obtained by Salem and Md Nor (2020) on the effect of COVID-19 on consumer behavior in switching from brick-and-mortar stores to e-commerce in Saudi Arabia, which showed perceived health risk not to be significant for e-commerce. It was shown that most of the consumers considered money fraud to be the highest risk of e-commerce.
The variables of online retail ethics consisting of security, privacy, reliability fulfillment, and service recovery also have a significant effect on online shopping behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. This involved the ability to handle transactions using a good security system and protecting consumer financial information from unauthorized access as well as the provision of reliable and accurate retail services as promised. Moreover, post-purchase activities such as adequate response to consumer complaints and good efforts in restoring satisfaction after failure can encourage online shopping behavior for consumers during the This variable indicates the perception of consumers that online retail websites do not use fraudulent or manipulative practices to persuade them to buy their offers. Respondents generally reported some online retailers to practice unfair persuasion activities by delivering products that do not match the description on their website and influencing consumers through excessive or fake promotions and advertisements. These, however, did not discourage consumers from shopping online during the pandemic, as they are more concerned with the perceived health risk, security, privacy, reliability fulfillment, and service recovery.
The coefficient value of each variable showed perceived health risk to be more dominant in influencing online shopping behavior of consumers than the variables for online retail ethics, and this can be associated with the higher concern of the consumers for their health during the pandemic. Moreover, the empirical results also showed that 72.4% of the respondents reported an increase in online purchases during the COVID-19 pandemic with an intensity of 3 to 10 times shopping activities in a month. They also avoided going to malls and shops considered to be crowded and risky, but prefer to shop online because it allows being done from home without physically interacting with other people, saves their time, provides more product choices and lower prices. They also consider that online shopping would enable them to accomplish shopping healthier and enhances their health safety performance during this COVID-19 pandemic.
These findings are in line with Grashuis et al. (2020), who studied grocery shopping preferences during the COVID-19 pandemic, and showed the trend in the number of cases that affected food shopping preferences of consumers in an environment with the high spread of the virus observed to be unable to visit stores and tend to buy things through the delivery method. Gao et al. (2020) also studied the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on the adoption of e-commerce in China for food products and found the share of confirmed cases to be increasing the possibility of consumers purchasing food online.

CONCLUSION
This study has highlighted the effect of perceived health risk and customer perception of online retail ethics on consumer online shopping behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia. The literature review showed that the effect of online retail ethics on attitude to the website, trust in the website, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, word-of-mouth, revisit intention, and repurchase intention is proved. Meanwhile, the effect of online retail ethics combined with perceived health risks on online shopping behavior especially during the COVID-19 pandemic is not fully examined. Therefore, this study has contributed to the literature by investigating the effect of perceived health risk and five variables of online retail ethics including security, privacy, non-deception, reliability fulfillment, and service recovery on online shopping behavior.
The results showed that the perceived health risk and four variables of online retail ethics including security, privacy, reliability fulfillment, and service recovery affect consumer online shopping behavior. This means higher potential health risks in a physical store and positive consumer perceptions of the behavior of online retail websites in providing services can encourage consumers to shop online during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study proved that the COVID-19 pandemic has been changing the shopping behavior and preferences of consumers. Due to the fear of the virus, they tend to shop online to minimize physical contact and curb the spread of the virus to maintain their health and those of their families.
This study did not include the mediating and moderating variables perceived to be related to the evaluation of perceived health risk, online retail ethics, and online shopping behavior. Therefore, it is suggested that consumer attitude and experience are added as the mediating variables or social, cultural, and personal attributes of consumers as the moderating variables in future studies to obtain a deeper understanding of the situation. The online store has adequate security features 0.776 The security policy of online store is easy to understand 0.853 The online store has clear terms and conditions of transactions 0.880 The online store offers secure payment methods 0.858

Privacy
The online store guarantees the confidentiality of consumer personal information 0.925 The online store protects consumer personal information from hacking 0.901 The online store does not collect my personal information excessively 0.388** When completing a transaction on the online store, I provide personal information such as full name, telephone number, email address and residential address 0.449**

Non-deception
The online store exaggerates the product benefits and characteristics of its offerings* 0.766 The online store takes advantage of less experienced consumers to make them purchase goods* 0.942 The online store tries to persuade through deceptive advertisements and promotions* 0.744

Reliability fulfilment
The price displayed on the online store website is in accordance with the price charged to the consumer 0.743 When shopping for products online, I receive them according to what I ordered 0.781 The online store website serves consumers as its promised 0.792

Service recovery
The online store responds to customer complaints promptly 0.709 The online store website has a compensation policy for any failures of products/services 0.767 The online store website has a reliable service recovery tracking system to identify customer satisfaction 0.790