Research Related to Online Shopping Motivational Factors

As the pace of modern life accelerates, online shopping has become a prevalent and popular method of gathering the everyday necessities and luxuries due to its convenience level for consumers. The emergence of online shopping events has shaped consumer purchase preferences and behaviors over time through various selling schemes, such as price discounts, bonus samples, and free shipping (Lee, 2016). These shopping sprees also create numerous opportunities for consumer impulse buying to take place, thus increase sales for online retailers (Xu & Huang, 2014).

Back in the 1990s, a group of Chinese university students initiated the idea of celebrating their single status on November 11th (Chan, 2017). This quickly became a trend and an annual date that most single university students would put in their calendars (Needham, 2017). Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba, realized the unique opportunity to merge this idea to the world of e-commerce as November 11th marks the date where singles splurge on themselves due to their non-relationship status (Lee, 2016). Hence, the first Double Eleven online shopping spree was launched on November 11th in 2009 and continued as an annual online shopping tradition up until the present (Tseng, 2017).

From the Double Eleven sales in 2018, Alibaba incurred a sales of 213.5 billion yuan, tantamount to $30.8 billion US dollar, through this 24-hour global shopping festival, which surpasses their sales record for 2017 by 45.3 billion yuan (McLean, 2018). Alibaba’s total gross merchandise volume (GMV) accounted for “nearly four times the combined online sales of Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the US” (Li, 2017). This rapid growth trend in sales has been present for years (Tseng, 2017).

Evidently, Alibaba has become a tech giant for providing e-commerce platforms, including but not limited to the Taobao marketplace and Tmall online store. Retailers from all over the world have an opportunity to showcase their brands through this centralized e-commerce platform (Li, 2017). As a result, retailers gain potential customers from the platform users by joining Alibaba, while consumers have a plethora of products and brands to select literally at their fingertips.

This big event has sparked my interest in how consumers behave during a shopping spree and the role that retail strategies play in sales, thus leading me to investigate the factors that increase spending through e-commerce cyber events. This study seeks to understand the influential motivational factors and reasons that increase consumer online shopping behaviors on Alibaba during the specific shopping event, Double Eleven. With the personal factors standpoint and the retailers’ marketing perspective incorporated throughout the study, it seeks to help retailers to recognize their possible improvements in the future to maintain and even promote more sales while also assisting consumers to identify their own online shopping tendencies and trends.

Literature Review

In order to understand the purpose of this research, it is essential to evaluate the existing works in the scholastic field to synchronize the established perspectives and conclusions of online shopping motivational factors. Some researchers have focused on the personal and demographic influence of consumers and identified gender, income level, and personality traits as some of the online purchasing motivational factors (Lubis, 2018; Huang & Yang, 2010). Lubis pointed out that people with higher incomes shop online more often. She also discovered in her studies that males have a higher tendency to shop online (Lubis, 2018). However, this research failed to consider the substantial differences that might exist due to cultural differences as Lubis provided an Indonesian perspective from her sample group of Indonesian consumers.

Similarly, some researchers conducted an experiment with a sample of 400 German shoppers to discuss the correlation between sales and sales agent (Holzwarth, Janiszewski, & Neumann, 2006). Though taking distinct perspectives and sample groups will help other researchers to construct a comprehensive worldview for online consumer behaviors, they are limited at the same time as these studies only presented strong arguments for those specific demographic sample groups. Thus, these limitations and gaps cited the need for presenting a clearer evaluation of the Chinese e-commerce market.

Besides the consumer-related factors, many researchers also advanced the notion of retailer behaviors which gave rise to other motivational factors that encourage online consumptions. Chiang and Dholakia took the standpoint of the online retailers and executed a study on the convenience characteristics of shopping channels. Their survey result, commenting on check out lines and the travel time, explained that consumers are more likely to purchase the goods that require less physical experience online to reduce the time and effort of going out to malls (2003). Based on their findings that interactive tools would help and benefit consumers during the cross-comparison period for alternative products in great depth, they drew parallel to Häubl and Trift’s experiment result while also giving credence to Holzwarth, Janiszewski and Neumann’s research conclusion (2000; 2006).

However, Kumar and Lang elaborated further and revealed that technology by itself does not significantly reduce search cost, but technology in combination with behavioral factors does (2004). These study results drew attention to the implementation of the search tools provided by Alibaba, such as its artificial intelligence service and Virtual Reality (VR) tools; however, they are also limited since they did not consider how a centralized platform, like Alibaba, would mitigate these issues by providing a standardized presenting format for each individual retailer, such as having a standardized website layout that allows individual retailers to display all their information in a standardized and formatted way.