7 Unorganized Retail Shopping Experience in India: An Empirical Investigation Adil Zia*, Khalid Mohammad Azam** *Dept. of Business Administration, FMSR, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh. **Dept. of Business Administration, FMSR, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh. The concept of shopping is one of the oldest activities that the human race has been performing with high level of regularity and involvement. Over the years, unorganized retail shoppers' orientation towards this routine activity has been changing with the inception of organized retail. The innovations brought by retailers and marketers in the practice of retailing have been providing new paradigms for shopping. This has also led to a body of knowledge that aims to understand orientation of unorganized retail shoppers towards shopping. This paper is an attempt to develop a scale measuring Shopping Experience and to measures the impact of various factors of shopping experience in the context of unorganized retail. Hypothesized model was developed based on literature survey and refined using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Reliability and validity of scale was checked using Cronbach alpha. Impact was measured using multiple regression method. This study is primary data based and the sample of 355 retail consumers was taken. Fifteen factors were found to be important to determine shopping experience in unorganized retail where “merchandise” has maximum positive impact with beta value of 0.0452 and “reliability” has the least impact with beta value of 0.017. Keywords: Indian Retail, Un-organized retail, Shopping Experience. Introduction Shopping is one of the oldest activities that the human race has been performing with high level of regularity and involvement. Over the years shoppers' orientation towards this routine activity has been changing. The innovations brought by retailers and marketers in the practice of retailing have been providing new paradigms in the way shoppers have been disposed towards their act of shopping. This has also led to a body of knowledge that aims to understand the orientation of shoppers towards shopping. The Shopping environment refers to the landscape of shopping, changing as it did from the first departmental store to present-day malls to virtual shopping through internet. It has been found that shoppers behave differently depending on the type of shopping situations. A fairly extensive amount of research examining individual shopping orientations indicates that orientations impact shopping behavior including store choice based on several factors such as consumer demographics and psychographics, usage situation, price sensitivity (Magi, 2003), social referents, involvement (Williams, Nicholas and Painter, 1978), segmentation (Sinha, 2003) and need recognition. Defining Organized and Unorganized Retail The Indian retail industry is divided into organized and unorganized sectors. The Indian retail sector is highly fragmented, with a major share of its business is being run by unorganized retailers like the traditional family run stores and corner stores. The organized retail however is at a very nascent stage, though attempts are being made to increase its proportion bringing in a huge opportunity for prospective new players. Unorganized Retail Sector Indian retail is dominated by a large number of small retailers consisting of the local kirana shops, owner-manned general stores, chemists, footwear shops, apparel shops, paan and beedi (local betel leaf and tobacco) shops, hand-cart hawkers, pavement vendors, etc. which together make up the so-called "unorganized retail" or traditional retail. The last few years have witnessed the entry of a number of organized retailers opening stores in various modern formats in metros and other important cities. Unorganized retailers normally do not pay taxes and most of them are not even registered for sales tax, VAT, or income tax. Organized Retail Sector Organized retailing refers to trading activities undertaken by licensed retailers, that is, those who are registered for sales tax, income tax, etc. These include the corporate-backed hypermarkets and retail chains, and also the privately owned large retail businesses. According to AT Kearney report for the year 2011, Organized retail accounts for 7 per cent of India's roughly US$ 435 billion retail market and is expected to reach 20 per cent by 2020. Food accounts for 70 per cent of Indian retail, but it remains Pacific Business Review International Volume 5 Issue 7 (January 2013)