(Source: Inside Retail Asia | 19 April 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 percent), Vietnam (96.2 percent), India (92.9 percent), Malaysia (92.8 percent) and Thailand (87.1 percent), 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 percent, followed by price (85.5 percent) and convenience (85.1 percent). This consideration resonates most strongly in Indonesia (95.3 percent), followed by the Philippines (92.2 percent), Taiwan (91.5 percent) and Malaysia (91.2 percent).
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 percent of Asia Pacific consumers questioned had made an online purchase, led by those in South Korea (96.7 percent), India (95.8 percent), Japan (95 percent), Vietnam (92 percent) and China (91.8 percent).
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 percent), assurance that transactions are secure (45.9 percent) and less friction in transaction processes (44.1 percent).
Clothing and accessories retailers are the most-visited category (37.3 percent of shoppers), followed by online supermarkets (37.3 percent) and app stores (36.9 percent).
Indonesian consumers are the most satisfied with their online shopping experience (97.1 percent), followed by India (94.3 percent) and Malaysia (92.6 percent).
Most consumers (36.1 percent) rely on word-of-mouth recommendations from close friends and family when choosing where to shop online, followed by social networking sites (27.4 percent) and traditional and online media sources (17.5 percent).
Conversely, in some countries consumers consider social networking sites more influential than personal recommendations. In Thailand, the ratio is (52.4 percent to 15.1 percent), followed by Malaysia (39 to 24.2 percent), Philippines (34.1 to 33.5 percent) and Indonesia (32.1 to 25.9 percent).
Most consumers in Asia Pacific (53.9 percent) feel secure when shopping online, especially in India (72.1 percent), Indonesia (66.4 percent), China (63.5 percent), Australia (62.2 percent) and New Zealand (59.8 percent).
However, consumers in Vietnam (34 percent), South Korea (34.6 percent), Japan (36.6 percent) and Hong Kong (37.4 percent) are more wary.
The Mastercard Online Shopping Survey covered 14 markets in Asia Pacific, with 8738 consumers being polled online in November.
Read More: https://insideretail.asia/2017/04/19/what-asian-online-shoppers-want/#daily
