Challenges in Online Shopping

THE END USER SATISFACTION OF ONLINE SHOPPING IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

SECTION1. Background of Research

1.1. Introduction to Online Shopping Internet has been widely used by everyone in this world;

it is one way for individual to connect to the other part of

the home-country. The huge number of internet user has become

an opportunity for business to be accessible to everyone

around the world; this is so called E-Commerce. E-Commerce

(Electronic Commerce) is where the selling and buying of

products and services happen through internet, and the process

of ordering, payment, and communication all through internet.

E-Commerce has become trend in either Developed or Developing

Countries. It boosts the profit of the company, because this

business can run without physical building and doesn’t require

any space, or storage system, but it only needs a high quality

of the front website to reach customers (World Trade

Organization, 2013).

E-Commerce indeed doesn’t need physical building to build

the business, but it needs good Information System in order to

control and to work the business out. Information system is a

computerized system that stands between the user – management

– and the business operations where the data is generated.

Information system plays a big role in organizations whereby

it produces a report of important and useful information that

will help the managers to make their decision making, planning

and controlling. MIS in the company helps the managers, top

Management Information System


level or middle level, to control their business going,

without MIS the organization will surely have problems

(Jahangir, 2005 cited in Nowduri, nd).

There are a lot of types of E-Commerce, like B2B

(Business to business), B2C (Business to customer), B2G

(Business to government) and mobile commerce. Examples are e-

procurement, e-banking, e-retailing, e-shopping, e-payment and

so on (World Trade Organization, 2013). One of the fastest

growing E-Commerce is Online Shopping (Kariyawasam, 2009).

Nowadays, online shopping is becoming popular amongst every

shopper as it’s not only saving most of the shopping time, but

it also provides good quality products with some promotions.

In online shopping we can find all the goods that we want,

doesn’t need us to walked around the supermarket to find our

desire goods, the products provided are ranging from

electronics to jewellery and footwear to apparels at the

comfort of your home or office (Whatech, 2013).

Since online shopping is demanding business in developed

countries such as US, there is a lot of journal talking about

the development of online shopping in developed countries, but

not many about the online shoppers in developing countries.

So, this report is to explore all about the online shoppers in

developing countries.



1.2. The Research Question:What could be the factors of satisfaction of the Online

Shoppers in Developing Countries?

1.3. Research Objectives: 1. To find out about the satisfaction of the customers

towards the Online Shopping in Developing Countries.

2. To determine system to improve the E-Shopping in

Developing Countries.



SECTION2: Review of Literature

2.1. Online Shopping

On-line shopping is “a single, homogenous activity, the

selling of goods and services via the World Wide Web” (Birkin

et al., 2002 cited in Awoyelu et al., 2010). With the global

connectivity from internet, organizations can relatively easy

getting access to business or customers who would normally be

outside of their market zone. Online Shopping is an electronic

commerce application used for business to business (B2B) or

business to customer (B2C) (Awoyelu et al, 2010).

Clearly, online shopping has given customers a lot of

benefits, which are specifically more advantageous when to

compares with the traditional shopping like going to mall, or

to stores. Online shopping usually allows customer to broader

products and services selection, like more of the product’s

brand, the features are more than the face-to-face interaction

in the real stores.

It also enables customers through the internet to explore

the products information, to collect data, download the

information, compare prices with different products, purchase

products, place and sometimes can also replace order whilst it

hasn’t been sent. Example like in the online shopping website,



normally it will provide the electronic finder so it will be

easier for the customer to search, compares and purchase.

Furthermore, customers that also been called online users

can also have a greater choice of geographical location from

where they want to purchase the products, resulting of the

satisfaction of the customer, because it might be cheaper in

the other country rather than their home country, this is

beneficial because customers don’t need to travel far to

purchase products and services anymore (Kariyawasam, 2009).

Kariyawasam (2009) also concluded that online shopping bring

convenience for everybody, because people can access to it

24/7, everywhere they are in the office or in café, or in the

house as long as they have internet access.

2.2. Online Users in Developing Countries

Developing Country is defined as countries that are

trying to enhance economically and socially. Recently, John

Koetsier in 2012 had done a research about the online shopping

users between developed and developing countries to a 16,000

workers in both developing and mature nations. This research

has shown that developing citizens are more into digital

purchasing channel rather than the developed citizen.



Most of the respondents agreed that in eight more years

ahead, the traditional stores will become a simple showroom,

there is no more stock in-store is necessary as the customers

is becoming comfortable having their product delivered to

their house. The high rates of the online customers also

caused by the infrastructure in the developing countries

themself, some of the developing countries do not have the

same shopping ecosystem, some do not even have mall, so to

overcome it they tend to have their transaction online

sometimes through mobile apps as well (Koetsier, 2012).

(Source: Koetsier, J. (2012). “ eCommerce: 16,000 interviews in 16 countries show

developing nations are more digital than us ” Cited on: 14 October 2013. <URL:

http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/10/ecommerce-16000-interviews-in-16-countries-shows-

developing-nations-are-more-digital-than-us/#i3ORq8SRCE4uIcYw.99 >)


http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/10/ecommerce-16000-interviews-in-16-countries-shows-developing-nations-are-more-digital-than-us/#i3ORq8SRCE4uIcYw.99



Compare to Developed Countries, the number of the

Internet Users in Developing Countries are more. In developed

countries only 63% of the population are using Internet, but

developing countries 80% of the population are using internet,

so obviously the market in Developing countries for online

shopping is better than the developed countries now compare to

it used to be. And 65% of the developed nations are using

social media to update

products information rather

than 30% only of the

developed nations which

means the developed nations

are more into online users.

More and more population

are switching into online

shopping (Koetsier, 2012).

This research is

supported by International

Telecommunication Union

(2013) proved that, indeed

the number of online users

in developing countries are

more than the developed

nations users. It is

shown in the table, which is comparing about the men and women

online users. The data is taken to overall the developed

nations and the overall of the developing nation’s online



users. And clearly we can differentiate the number which is in

developed nations, only 475million but in developing countries

it is 826million women shop online. The men also with the

scale of 483million in developed countries and 980million in

developing countries. This is surely proved that now the

developing countries population are more into online shopping,

because they feel the trust and the comfortable in shopping

(International Telecommunication Union, 2013).



(Source: Koetsier, J. (2012). “ eCommerce: 16,000 interviews in 16 countries show developing

nations are more digital than us ” Cited on: 14 October 2013. <URL:

http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/10/ecommerce-16000-interviews-in-16-countries-shows-developing-

nations-are-more-digital-than-us/#i3ORq8SRCE4uIcYw.99 >)

So, the table above shows about the figure of the

respondents of every developing nation on how they do their

online shopping (types on online shoppers) whether are they

social digital shoppers, digital shopaholics, rational online

shoppers, value seekers, occasional online shoppers, or

techno-shy shoppers. It shows that different country has

different types of online shoppers. China, India, Brazil,

Mexico, Turkey, and Russia, are ranked as the most number of





online users of the developing countries. Mostly, in India

almost 50% of the respondents answer that they are the most

social digital shoppers which means they always shop through

social media. China claims to be the biggest number of all as

the more digital shopaholic users, where most of their online

users are using online shopping more than the traditional shop

(Koetsier, 2012). To have those users keep shopping online

there is one thing that company has to pin point which is the

customer’s satisfactions.

2.3. Customer’s Satisfaction; Service Quality and Trust

Explained by Fang, et al (2011) benefits are not only for

customers, has online shopping helped the company which are

struggling to survive in this weak economy condition to earn

revenue. Many researchers have come out with conclusion that

the critical part of success that company has to look at is

Service Quality, Trust and Satisfaction. According to Kurt and

Atrek (2012), importance of the service quality reflects of

the effect on the customer’s satisfaction.

Customer’s satisfaction is believed as one of the most

important particulars in the success of the online stores as

it is the after purchase phenomena. Low Price and Web-Presence

used to be the factors that attract the customers, but

recently, Service Quality has becoming crucial in improving

and attracting more customers (Fang, et al, 2011). To measure

the customer’s satisfaction some of the researchers had agreed



to use Kano’s model as the measurement scale (Kurt and Atrek,

2012)

Based on Kurt and Atrek, (2012) service Quality can be

defined as the extent of the efficient and effective shopping

by the website in terms on the shopping, purchasing, delivery.

Many researcher mentioned by Lin and Sun (2009) surveyed on

the important roles played by the website surface and service

quality in the customer’s satisfaction and customer’s loyalty.

Several researchers had come out with model/scale to

measure the Service Quality in online companies, it’s

important for the company to evaluate their activities through

the measurement scale. There are a lot of measurement models

of service quality, however, Fang, et.al (2011) had also

agreed on Kurt and Atrek (2012) about the scale developed by

Parasuraman, et. al (2005), E-S-QUAL which is widely accepted

by the company’s in order to measure their service quality.

They tend to use it recently because they wanted to hit the

satisfaction level of the customers.

When the company provides good service quality, like

special treatment benefits, the customers will surely have

more satisfaction in the online stores and when customers feel

satisfied with the website, they will be more loyal towards

the company. E-loyalty will also increase if the online shops

are responsive on the feedback. That is why company nowadays

are crucial in measuring the service quality of their online

shops (Lai et al, (2007) cited in Lin and Sun (2009)).



Trust is also one of the critical factors in online

shopping, Pavlou and Fygenson (2006) cited in Fang, et.al

(2011) mentioned that trust is a buyer’s belief that the

sellers will act ethically. They also believe that if the

vendors were ethical, it would increase the customer’s

intention to purchase their products.

It is arguable that in the traditional market, it is

trusty that the seller will satisfy its market needs, but in

the online transaction the customer will find it hard to trust

the online shop, thus trust plays an important role to attract

more loyal customers (Kariyawasam, 2009). Most importantly,

the development of trust is very crucial for company because

it resulted in a long-term relation between the customer’s and

vendor for repurchasing (Kariyawasam, 2009).



SECTION3: Proposed Suggestion

3.1. Service Quality Model in Online Shopping – E, S,

QUAL.

Though there are lots of online customers in Developing

Countries but as we have describe before there are some

problems which can affect the satisfaction level of the

customer not fully achieved. The first challenge is about the

Service Quality of the online shop website where these factors

has become increasingly important in order to attract more

customers, increase their satisfaction and increase the number

of customer loyalty. These are mostly problems about the

website page, the simply the front page is the easier people

can access.

Service Quality is more demanded by the customers, it is

defined as how well a delivered service matches the customer’s

expectation. Kurt and Atrek (2012) cited that e-service



quality can also be defined as “the consumers’ primarily

appraisal and decision of the excellence and quality of e-

service offerings in the virtual sphere”. In order to improve

the service quality of the online shop, researchers had also

found a model that online shop can use to test their service

quality towards the customer’s perception.

The model is called, E, S, QUAL scale which identified 4

dimension of the electronic service quality from 22-item

scale, this model was proposed by Parasuraman in 2005 (Fang,

et al, 2005). The four dimensions is the summarized of the 22-

items scale which are the questionnaire’s questions that is

conducted by the researcher to measure the efficiency, system

availability, fulfilment and privacy where all fall into the 4

dimension of E,S,QUAL (Prasuraman, 2005). The efficiency is

used to measure the comfort and speed in accessing the

website, the system availability is used to figure out the

technical functioning of the website, fulfilment is to ensure

the website’s promises about the order delivery and item

availability are fulfilled and last is the privacy which is to

measure the security and privacy level of the website in

protecting the customer’s information (Kurt and Atrek, 2012).

E,S,QUAL has been widely used as the e-service quality

measurement by most of the researchers in their online

research for instance, based on Kurt and Atrek (2012), Boshoff

(2007) applied E-S-QUAL on customers of an internet marketing

firm concluded that E-S-QUAL is a valid and reliable tool to

determine e-service quality in an electronic shopping



background, and some other journals. This is a prove that

E,S,QUAL is a strong tools for manager to measure the service

quality of their website however, this model might not work in

other businesses service quality it only can measure the

online service quality, and also the aspect of fun or pleasure

are not in the scale because they are like benefits of

shopping which might not be relevant in all context to all the

customers (Parasuraman, 2005).

After E,S,QUAL there are actually some other more models

came out as the improvement, like E,A,S,QUAL (2006),

E,TransQual (2006), PES,Q (2007), E,SelfQual (2011). But still

the most used tools is E, S, QUAL because the results contains

all the most important criteria of the online shopping

experience (Kurt and Atrek, 2012). E, S, QUAL is basically

only for measuring the website performance, and quality, well,

it does help but the most important of all things is the

customer’s satisfaction. So, to measure customer’s

satisfaction there is another model suggested.

3.2. Customer’s Satisfaction Model in Online Shopping –

Kano’s Model.

There is one best model that the company can use in order

to measure the satisfaction level of the customers towards

their website, services, and through all the experience of

online shopping, which is Kano’s Model or the Theory of

Attractive Quality, this model was invented by Noriaka Kano in



1970s and 1980s while he was doing his research on control

quality and consumer’s satisfaction. Kano’s Model is to

address the relationship of the objective performance of the

given quality attribute to the customer’s satisfaction out of

the quality attribute (Kano, et al, 1984, cited in Kurt and

Atrek, 2012).

Not all the quality attribute in a shopping website can

meet the customer’s perception, but some attribute can meet

the perception which can make the customer’s happy however,

happy doesn’t mean satisfied. So, this Kano’s Model is to

measure the quality attribute of website, the higher the

fulfilment of the request attribute of the website the more

customers will gain the satisfaction (Kurt and Atrek, 2012).

This model introduced 5 categories of measurement, there

are, Must-be, One-Dimensional, Attractive, Indifferent,

Reverse. This model tells us about Must-Be, there are some

components in the website that is a must to be put, without

this components, the customers will be extremely dissatisfied.

This Must-Be is to only fulfilled the stage of satisfied just

to be safe from the dissatisfied category, that is why this

category is a basic criteria for a product. For example on the

hotel service, in every hotel room the company will have to

make sure that the customers will enjoy the hot water, the

comfortable beds, the toilet to be in the room. Well, that is

a must features in hotel so if the company can’t even provide

it for sure people won’t be satisfied.



One dimensional will report about the result of the

satisfaction, every online shop has to hit the point in order

to compete with others, if the pointer is telling not

satisfied meaning the website needed changes to improve the

customer satisfaction. The higher the fulfilment the more

satisfied customers will be and mostly this one dimensional

are explicitly demanded by the customers.

Attractive is about the webpage, it provides satisfaction

when it presents, but caused no dissatisfaction when it

absents. This

criteria has got

big impact on

improving the

customer’s

satisfaction in a

given products,

because the given

products can be

either the

explicitly products or the one that is expected by the

customers, if we can fulfil this requirement the customers

will be surely more satisfied but if it’s not fulfilled it

doesn’t really effect the satisfaction.

Indifferent is checking about the fulfilment, the result

doesn’t have any impact on the satisfaction, but this will be

resulted from the attractive itself, whilst if the

attractiveness is fulfilled for sure there must be something



different that the company has done, which is different to

attract more customers, by then the result is as well

fulfilling the indifferent category. Like we provides search

link where the customers can link to the others website which

provides the same products, so customers can compare the

price, so let’s assume that no website has done this because

it may cause lost maybe, but if the company provided the

lowest price sure it will help and this situation can be

indifferent form the other company. That’s when it is

attractive because for sure it will save the online users’

time more than usual time; it’s easier, faster for them to do

research on the products. Attractive and indifferent

categories achieved (Kurt and Atrek, 2012).

Reverse, to see what the customer’s feel, this reverse is

meant to check on the functional and dysfunctional. These are

the types of question in the survey of this Kano’s model (Kurt

and Atrek, 2012).

To do this Kano’s model it’s simple and easy, first we

need to define the company’s users’ needs, like their basic

expectation and tell the condition of the features absence

what would the consequences be. Then, map the products and

services against the Kano model, those meeting the basic

expectation need to be improved and maintain, in order to

fulfil the desired of the online users, and also defines which

feature of the website that are delighters, and demanded by

the customers, to this extent company has to focus on

developing new features as well (Erlksson, 2013).



In order to sort out the attributes into the Kano’s

categories, the features are first categorized by survey and

then grouping. Respondent will be questioned about the

features in 2 types of questions which are functional

question, asking about if the features were applied in the

website, what they would feel and dysfunctional question is

asking about if they were not applied what the customer’s

would feel (Mikulic’ and Prebezac, 2011).

Next is simple step where company needs to monitor the

customers’ satisfaction and

to ensure that no other

competitor is having the

same delighting features,

and to check whether the

features that we think

delighter has been the

basic expectation of the

other companies, if it did

then it won’t help to

enhance the user

satisfaction anymore.

Lastly is company needs to only focus on the delighters and to

adjust it to be really unique that other company doesn’t have

and to continues delivering the customer’s satisfaction

(Erlksson, 2013).

3.3. Challenges in the Online Shopping



Trust is factor that online shops have to really look

into, based on Kariyawasam (2009), some reason that customers

do not want to go for online shopping is because they are

insecure of the security. Well, if we really look into it,

insecure is the psychology effect of trust, think it this way,

if you don’t trust the website, you will be thinking

negatively about the website, about the security, about the

vendors, whether or not they lie, all is about Trust. To make

customers trust the website is not an easy task (Kariyawasam,

2009).

To build the trust of customers towards the website is

coming from the vendors themselves, sellers can actually have

a conversation with the buyers in the website, some buyers

must have a need of guidance so by having conversation with

them, and vendor can actually help the buyers to purchase the

goods. This is one way to boost the trust of the customers,

but this is not enough, a general perception of

professionalism can also be the factors, vendors have to be

aware on who advertised in their websites (Kariyawasam, 2009).

The last challenge but not least is about the Payment

System. According Awoyelu, and friends (2010) online users

usually use their Credit card for payment, also some online

shop system enables users to create accounts and pay by

alternatives method, example like Credit Card, Debit Card,

Cash on Delivery, E-Cash, and Cheque Money Transfer. After

payment, users are allowed to download the products or the

goods will be delivered to the customers.



However Awoyelu, et al. (2010) added that not all the

places have got the same access, some rural areas haven’t got

such services yet, like in Nigeria, there are about thousands

of people access to internet only through their mobile, and it

also used as a modem for their PCs. This is due to the

introduction of General Packet Radio Service (GPRS)

connectivity by the GSM operators so they basically

monopolized by the GSM operators, to accept or not.

This has made the transaction become harder to

accomplished, to overcome this problem the system that the

online shop can do is to apply the recharge card which is

almost similar to debit card, this is to the rural place where

there is no access of any credit card services.

SECTION4: Conclusion

Summarize of this report is about the end user

satisfaction of the online shopping in the developing

countries. Satisfaction of customers is the crucial factor to

have online business successfully operated. There are some

factors that can boosts up the satisfaction of the customer in

online shopping are to improve the service quality, to measure

e-service quality the online shop can use E, S, QUAL Model and



Kano’s Model to predict the end user satisfaction level of the

website. However the E,S,QUAL model can only be used to

measure online service quality no other types of business, and

also it can’t fit all the aspect only 22 aspect that we think

the most influencing affect, we might left one or two best

points. Kano’s model as well, it can only measure the effect

of the features to the customers’ satisfaction but it doesn’t

provide solution to fix them mistakes.

Secondly, is to improve the trustworthy of the customers,

by selecting the best services to help the customers in

purchasing the goods, to make them feel secure and trusty for

the online shop. Lastly is to improve the payment system in

the online shop that is by providing recharge card for the

rural areas customers who can’t access the credit card or the

debit services. This report is beneficial for the online

company only, because the model describe is only for online

business. It actually best read by the manager of the online

business because this report explore more into end user

satisfaction to better the services quality which can boosts

up profit for sure.



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Challenges in Online Shopping

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