E-commerce Market in Australia: Attributes Influencing Customers

E-commerce market in Australia-
attributes influencing customers
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Executive summary
The main aim of this study was to determine the attributes influencing the customers towards
their engagement in online shopping and the issues faced by customers on online shopping. Data
used by the researcher was secondary and was obtained from data.world. Frequency data
analysis was employed in the exploration and analysis of data. From the study, the findings
indicated that social platforms imposed both good and bad influence on e-commerce businesses.
Furthermore, issues identified that were faced by the customers in the journey of online shopping
were trust, data security, awareness, accessibility, perceived quality and the role government. It
was then concluded and recommended that such issues affecting ecommerce needed to be
addressed adequately for the development of ecommerce industry.
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Table of content
Contents
Executive summary.......................................................................................................... ii
Introduction.................................................................................................................... 1
Review of literature.......................................................................................................... 2
Research methodology...................................................................................................... 3
Data findings and analysis.................................................................................................. 5
Conclusion and recommendations...................................................................................... 14
Conclusions.................................................................................................................. 14
Recommendations.......................................................................................................... 15
References................................................................................................................... 16
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Introduction
Advancement in internet technology have resulted to great effects in the market in various ways
such as the market coverage among others. Population of the people using the internet have been
increasing continuously day by day as this could be evident by the increased number of world
wide web (www) users (Memon et al, 2014). The development of e-commerce is accompanied
by variety of benefits to the businesses that incorporate internet activities in their daily operations
(McDermott and Payvision, 2015). Businesses tend to show improved efficiencies and increased
revenues as well as increased customers’ range of coverage in the market thus creating other
opportunities for new businesses. Development of e-commerce and its successfulness would lead
to embracing of the notion of new economy known as e-economy (Ghandour, 2015). Australia
among other countries across the world have been experiencing rapid growth of internet users
and businesses that transact their activities through the internet i.e. (online businesses). E-
commerce business in the country has contributed mainly to the growth of Australian economy
adding unto the various records the country’s economy had broken as recorded in history. This
has come as a way of improving and achieving the long term economic expansion determined to
support strong retail environment (Mahato et al, 2017). Compared to other countries in the
world, Australia has the highest life expectancy of 81.9 years in the world. This acted as one of
the key factors considered for the growth of online customers and development of e-commerce
market at large in the country.
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Review of literature
By the year 2020, Australian e-commerce market is expected to increase by about 9.8% each
year since at moment, the online shoppers penetration stood at 62.58% by 2016 where the
number was expected to grow by some positive values and get to 69% come 2020. From the
conducted research, it was evident that Australians were in the forefront of online shopping
abandonment with the majority of the Australians buying mostly clothes, electronics and
multimedia products online (Sohaib and Kang, 2014). Growth in technology strong internet
coverage in various parts of the world have made it easier for people to have access to the
internet and carry on with their activities such as socializing and particularly shopping. Easy
access to electronic gadgets such as android phones, Iphones, tablets, laptops, desktop computers
and other electronic gadgets that enable users to access the internet have contributed to the
development of ecommerce (Yu et a, 2016). While on the internet, customers are capable of
choosing from variety of suppliers of the same product within touch of the button from their
gadgets thus enabling them to compare prices before making decisions of buying from a
particular supplier. It has been revealed that young generation led in the use of online services
offered over the internet. In Australia, reports showed that among those who had been active
over the internet, majority were aged between 18 and 36 years forming a new customers of
online shopping system (Guzzo et al, 2016). Being that the population of youths and young
generation is dominant in Australia, the demand of ecommerce was expected to increase rapidly
to match the increased number of online users and ecommerce market. The satisfaction of
customers can be measured from the effect that the number of customers engaging in the
ecommerce business activities is increasing day by day (Izogo and Ogba 2015). This study
therefore seek to assess the customer satisfaction towards e-commerce market in Australia. This
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was checked considering both business to business transaction through the internet and business
to customers or customers to businesses through the internet too.
Research methodology
Secondary data was collected by the researcher and was used in the analysis to find the results
that supported the study. Secondary data is the already existing data that have been collected by
other people/ researchers and are readily available for use by others from other sources (Ellram
and Tate, 2016). Such data are in most cases preferred because they are economical thus save
time, efforts and expenses since they are only retrieved from the archival source. Furthermore,
according to (Dunn et al, 2015), secondary data was preferred because of its nature of assisting in
improving the problem understanding and giving the basis for comparison of the data collected
by the researcher on a particular subject matter. For the collected secondary data to hold, the data
needs to be updated (Carroll et al, 2017) and in that case the researcher collected data on the
ecommerce that covered from the year 2015 to date on the consumer satisfaction and what
influenced their use of online for shopping. The collected secondary data comprised of the
following data items in the data file, segment type, social platform, count (continuous),
percentage, level of customers’ satisfaction and their influence experience with 1450 number of
cases. The data was collected from data archive data.world.
The retrieved data were in excel file where they were further organized and analyzed using the
SPSS statistical software. The software was used in the manipulation of data and generation of
tables and figures which were copied and pasted to support the study. Qualitative and
quantitative data analysis approaches will be employed by the researcher to fully leverage the
data. Frequency statistics was used to represent data in tables and figures for depiction and easy
interpretation of the data. Data will as well be explored using descriptive statistics to find some
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