Consumer's Trust Level and Behaviour, a Challenge for Local E-Commerce

For the last a couple of years, e-commerce or online buy-sell service providers are growing in number. However this year might gets even more interesting and will become foundation for e-commerce's growth next stage in Indonesia including in payment gateway development.

Aswin Utomo from AdaDiskon, during interview with DailySocial last month said that 2010-2011 is e-commerce year and 2011-2012 will be payment gateway's turn. In some ways, I agree. At least payment gateway education by business doers will trigger e-commerce's growth.

In addition to the size of market we can reach and the growth of business doers, I think there are 'basic' elements that e-commerce doers should pay attention as well. Both for those who've applied various facilities like shopping cart up to integrated payment and those who conducts their buy-sell process and promotion online: Consumer's trust and behavior.

From DS-Research result released at the end of last month, we can see there are dominating factors for e-commerce doers to escalate, one of them is 'trust'. Consumer's level of trust in purchasing online is still to be maintained, even increased. Trust becomes the most dominant factor when asked to respondent of what can be increased from e-commerce's service. The reason why respondent refuse to buy online is mainly security issue.

This also related to purchase behavior and the amount of money consumer would spend on online purchase. On June 2011 edition of Marketeers magazine, based on their research, that the largest number in online purchase went to Fashion & Apparel. Waizly Darwin, Marketeers'  Chief Operation said during a presentation awhile ago that one of the reason why apparel products become option in online shopping is affordable price, so if there's any mistake or fiasco in purchase process the loss will not be so big.

Smaller risk related to trust level is the more buyer trust e-commerce service providers, the more they are willing to shop in higher price. Results from DS-Research also reveals the same result, that apparel grabbed number one place for the most purchased items. The amount spent most in e-commerce is between Rp. 100.000 – Rp. 500.000.

Payment method development and the growing numbers of e-commerce doers, which educate consumers and sellers, will support e-commerce development. However several things like e-commerce service itself , among others related to security should be improved and maintained because it will affect consumer's purchase behavior.

You can download DS-Research's “How Indonesia’s Youngsters Use E-Commerce” here.