Do Perceived Riders’ Conditions Influence Online Food Delivery? Investigating Determinants of Online Food Delivery during COVID-19 Outbreak

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic and consumers’ perception of riders’ conditions influence the adoption of online food delivery. This research tries to extend the current literature on online food delivery (OFD) by adding two new perspectives not yet extensively investigated, namely COVID-19 pandemic and perceived riders’ conditions. We extend the technology acceptance model (TAM) with COVID-19 and perceived riders’ condition to empirically evaluate consumers’ behaviours in the OFD context. This paper adopts a quantitative and exploratory approach. Specifically, the study leverages the PLS approach to SEM using SmartPLS for model evaluation. The final sample of this study consists of 492 consumers in Italy. Our research shows that both COVID-19 and perceived riders’ condition negatively influence the adoption of online food delivery.