CACTUS CACTUS J Tour Bus Manag Econ CACTUS – Journal of Tourism Business, Management and Economics 2247-3297 ASE Publishing House Bucharest, Romania 10.24818/CTS/3/2021/1.03 cactus-2021-4 Research Article The Impact of Covid-19 on Consumer Behavior in the Retailing Industry of Lebanon Tarhini Bassam https://orcid.org/0009-0005-6961-4099 bassam.tarhini@liu.edu.lb Hafiz Layal Bucharest University of Economic Studies – ASE Bucuresti, Romania Lebanese International University - LIU, Lebanon 15 6 2021 3 1 1562021 Copyright © 2021, The Author(s) 2021 The Author(s) This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

COVID-19 has changed many aspects of human lives. Life was paused for a while and humanity has been exposed to many threats unprepared at most levels. Several studies were conducted to understand human behavior amid crises and their behavior during COVID-19. Panic and spiritual buying dominates the buying behavior. This research investigates the emerged trends to the retail industry amid COVID-19. Several hypotheses were tested to understand the cause and effect relationship between the brick-and-mortar and online shopping. In order to reach a realistic result a quantitative research was conducted and a non-probability convenience sampling method was used where 191 respondents answered the survey questions on a 5 point Likert and nominal scales. It was found that consumer behavior is common across different countries amid COVID-19 with slight variation related to online shopping due to lack of trust with online sources. It was noticed that Lebanese post the pandemic became less price sensitive towards health products as they seek quality and willing to pay more to get it.

 Keywords COVID-19 retailing industry consumer behavior online shopping

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