Rakuten Survey: Average Indonesian Consumers Spend $239 A Year in Online Shopping

Recently Rakuten, as one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world, conducted a survey involving 5000 respondents in 12 countries around the world, including Indonesia. Facilitated by Survey Sampling International, the survey showed that Indonesian consumers spend $239 (Rp 2.3 million) on average in 2012 to shop online. While the figure may seem large, it's actually the smallest among the surveyed countries.

As a comparison, Malaysian consumers spend $344 to shop online while the average spend among all the countries is $725 with English consumers spending the most. According to the survey Indonesian consumers value trust as the highest factor when shopping online (69%). This leads to Indonesian consumers having the highest percentage to share and recommend their products of choice on various social networks (78%). Japanese consumers are the least likely to provide recommendations with only 8% willing to do so.

Indonesian consumers also show a healthy percentage for online shopping using mobile devices (smartphone/tablet) (14%) even though generally global consumers rarely prefer to use smartphones as their shopping medium. Although the growth of online shopping throughout 2012 reached 11%, 28% of Indonesia's consumers still prefer to shop conventionally at physical stores.

As quoted by Okezone, President Director and CEO of PT Rakuten Belanja Online Ryota Inaba said, "It's no longer the time to have a website that only shows what you sell but you must now have all the information that consumers need shown on the wsbite of through mobile. This is a research breakthrough. Social platforms are getting ready to grow in the upcoming years. As an industry we have to build trust in consumers and social shopping platforms, as well as making it easy for consumers to share contents through existing channels".

[Image: Flickr/perlengaby]