Survey Findings - Customer Profile

To start things off, the first part of the survey investigated the motivations for shopping online and what users were trying to achieve when they choose to go online. The stand out answers from the respondents (Figure 5.2.1) were how online shopping allowed them to have the convenience of shopping from home as well as making it easier to get things without multiple visits to different stores, resulting in time-savings.

Figure 5.2.1 – Motivations for Online Shopping

As shown above, 82% of respondents indicated one major consideration of online shopping was the convenience factor. The timesavings effect had 62% of the vote, whilst cheaper prices and easier search garnered 56% and 51% respectively. The results were hardly surprising as the retail industry shifts towards the online age many consumers have embraced the benefits of searching and buying on the Internet.

To further dive into this, the results could then be broken down to look at whether gender differences played any significant impact. After breaking down the results, it seems the convenience factor still was the major choice of both males and females (see Figure 5.2.2), but some differences in the other options were interesting to note.

For the ladies, both timesavings (66%) and cheaper prices (59%) had more votes than easier search (49%). On the other hand, male counterparts indicated that easier search (58%) and finding items unavailable at stores (58%) were more likely reasons to shop online.

Figure 5.2.2 – Gender Differences in Motivations

For the guys, timesavings (46%) and cheaper prices (46%) were less popular answers.

As for the other reasons to shop online they pretty much contributed similar percentage of votes regardless of gender differences. Perhaps the only difference was females viewing online shopping as more fun, almost 10% more than males, even if this might be a typical stereotype for anyone to have.

The general results indicate that the Taiwanese consumers are still very objective when it comes to online shopping, less than a quarter of respondents both male and female said that it was fun to shop online. Seems our consumers had “Jobs” that were practical rather than experiential.

Figure 5.2.3 – Motivations by Priority

In order to also understand the level of importance of these “Jobs”, respondents were also asked to rank them. As seen from Figure 5.2.3 above, the convenience factor was overwhelming when it came to the top priority for our respondents with 33% saying that would be their main reason for shopping online. As for making a choice for the second ranked reason, the group was split between convenience (22%) and timesavings (24%).

However, as we move from top priority to 2nd and then to the 3rd priority you would notice that the percentages are becoming less dominant. When users had to choose what was their 3rd priority, the scores were much more evenly spread across the board with easier search edging out the other reasons slightly at 19%. This suggests that everyone might have a very strong common reason in their mind when they choose to go online shopping, but after the main reason everyone has different priorities as they are trying to focus on different “Jobs” as also indicated with the gender difference in Figure 5.2.2 earlier.

The next questions helped us to get a better idea of the frequency in which our users went online to shop, and whether they completed their purchase.

Figure 5.2.4 – Browsing vs. Purchasing

Most of the respondents were frequently using shopping platforms online only half of them were completing their purchases regularly. The other half were simply just browsing or would save the items they liked for further consideration. Whether they did complete the purchase at a later time is not captured in this survey.

Based on the initial research as well as insights from our interview, it was obvious that mobile apps were still not as popular as websites here in Taiwan. The survey results (Figure 5.2.5) confirmed this with more than 80% saying their preferred choice was websites, but on a positive note about half of the respondents gave a definitive “Yes”

(Figure 5.2.6) when asked if they would increase their usage of mobile apps if the overall experience were improved.

Figure 5.2.5 – Platform Preference

Figure 5.2.6 – Improved Apps lead to Increased Usage

The next question started to narrow down on why they felt frustrated by the mobile app experience and what were the “Pains” of using mobile apps. The summary of the results as shown in Figure 5.2.7 reveals that 62% of respondents felt the limited items displayed on screen was a frustrating point when using mobile apps. This means that 2 out of 3 users feel the limited display of items sour the shopping experience.

This lack of display real estate might also have indirectly caused frustrations linked to navigating too many pages (45%), hard to view detailed information (44%) and poor layout & design (30%). A small number of respondents said they had no major

frustrations with the app experience, but aside from that 4% of our respondents, it was a pretty clear everyone had some complaints to share.

Figure 5.2.7 – Frustrations Using Mobile Apps

In the ranking, again overwhelming top pain point is the limited items displayed on screen, but at 2nd and 3rd spot, the choices are not so dominant.

Figure 5.2.8 – Ranking Frustrations

Next we moved on to the “Gains” portion of the Customer Profile, investigating the features that consumers felt were required and which were not as critical. The features are arranged from top to bottom in descending order of necessity (Figure 5.2.9).

Top of the list includes search, payment security, sufficient information as well as well-sorted categories where almost all said that it is a critical must have expectation of any good online shopping platform.

Further down the list it would be worth noting that the percentages were starting to get evened out, such that less of our respondents felt the feature was a required gain.

Towards the bottom of the list starting from reward points, other features such as quality products and having a 24-hr customer service all become more of a “Nice-to-have” with the pink bar overtaking the grey one.

Figure 5.2.9 – Expectations of Respondents