What Asian online shoppers want

Internet Retailing

20th Apr 2017

Four in five Asian online shoppers who bought last year plan to make at least one more purchase in the first half of this year.

The repeat business trend is led by emerging markets including China (97.3 per cent), Vietnam (96.2 per cent), India (92.9 per cent), Malaysia (92.8 per cent) and Thailand (87.1 per cent), according to the Mastercard survey.

However, online security is still a vital consideration for the region’s consumers. Only half of consumers surveyed say they feel secure about shopping online.

Providing secure payment systems is critical for 85.9 per cent, followed by price (85.5 per cent) and convenience (85.1 per cent). This consideration resonates most strongly in Indonesia (95.3 per cent), followed by the Philippines (92.2 per cent), Taiwan (91.5 per cent) and Malaysia (91.2 per cent).

Mastercard’s Asia Pacific senior VP for digital payments, Ben Gilbey, says shoppers are looking for such options as digital wallets and biometric payments.

In the three months preceding the survey, 90 per cent of Asia Pacific consumers questioned had made an online purchase, led by those in South Korea (96.7 per cent), India (95.8 per cent), Japan (95 per cent), Vietnam (92 per cent) and China (91.8 per cent).

More can be done…

To drive the growth of e-commerce in the region, respondents say more can be done to improve the shopping experience with free or minimal delivery charges (62.9 per cent), assurance that transactions are secure (45.9 per cent) and less friction in transaction processes (44.1 per cent).

Clothing and accessories retailers are the most-visited category (37.3 per cent of shoppers), followed by online supermarkets (37.3 per cent) and app stores (36.9 per cent).

Indonesian consumers are the most satisfied with their online shopping experience (97.1 per cent), followed by India (94.3 per cent) and Malaysia (92.6 per cent).

Most consumers (36.1 per cent) rely on word-of-mouth recommendations from close friends and family when choosing where to shop online, followed by social networking sites (27.4 per cent) and traditional and online media sources (17.5 per cent).

Conversely, in some countries consumers consider social networking sites more influential than personal recommendations. In Thailand, the ratio is (52.4 per cent to 15.1 per cent), followed by Malaysia (39 to 24.2 per cent), Philippines (34.1 to 33.5 per cent) and Indonesia (32.1 to 25.9 per cent).

Most consumers in Asia Pacific (53.9 per cent) feel secure when shopping online, especially in India (72.1 per cent), Indonesia (66.4 per cent), China (63.5 per cent), Australia (62.2 per cent) and New Zealand (59.8 per cent).

However, consumers in Vietnam (34 per cent), South Korea (34.6 per cent), Japan (36.6 per cent) and Hong Kong (37.4 per cent) are more wary.

The Mastercard Online Shopping Survey covered 14 markets in Asia Pacific, with 8738 consumers being polled online in November.

This story first appeared on sister site, Inside Retail Asia.