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Top1. Introduction
Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is revolutionizing the traditional way of marketing and distribution of products (Goyal et al., 2019). As a result of changes in the information and communication technology (ICT) landscape, e-commerce is presently increasing quickly in various emerging markets and developing economies (Reardon et al., 2021a). Thus, large enterprises, as well as micro-businesses, have adopted e-commerce platforms for business transactions (Zilber & de Araújo, 2012). E-commerce has been rapidly growing in recent decades, and by the next two years, more or less 70% of consumers will be involved in online purchases (Spruit & Almenar, 2021). Specifically, it continues to provide changes to the food sector, particularly in introducing new products, innovations in supply chain structures, and transforming how food products are bought, sold, and distributed (Gee et al., 2020).
An unprecedented increase in people buying food online hit its mark in February 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic worsened globally (Alaimo et al., 2020; Gao et al., 2020). The emergence of COVID-19 has posed an unexpected threat to public health, affecting the global economy and supply chain (Din et al., 2022). To deal with COVID-19, governments were collectively aiming for a slow virus transmission within communities by implementing strict health protocols, thus limiting people’s mobility outside their households (Tong et al., 2021; Din et al., 2022). It reduced the demand for restaurant and hotel services while raising the demand for food delivery (Reardon et al., 2021b). In line with this obligatory circumstance and with the interest of people in online shopping due to some attractive factors (Basar et al., 2021), people are gradually inclined to purchase food and necessities through such e-commerce platforms in order to meet their needs and their consumption (Sheth, 2020; Lin et al., 2021). Virtual marketplaces of various companies emerge where Social Networking Sites (i.e., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) are the baseline to continually connect with their consumers (Hajli et al., 2014a; Hajli et al., 2014b). These recent developments make e-commerce in the food sector an increasingly important domain in the current literature (Din et al., 2022; Spruit & Almenar, 2021; Hajli et al., 2014a). For brevity, the specific works tackling this topic are omitted here, but the reader is referred to the most recent reviews on food e-commerce (e.g., Jiang et al., 2021; Voldnes et al., 2021; Zhang & Berghäll, 2021).