Consumers in Asia Pacific flocked to popular e-commerce sites

Salim Ahmed

Lahore

As the year comes to a close, consumers in Asia Pacific have flocked to popular e-commerce sites to maximise deals from hefty discounts, since the Singles’ Day in November to “12.12” and now to Christmas – the grand finale of this year’s shopping season. Amidst the popularisation of online shopping sprees during the holiday season, customers are leaving traces of their digital footprints and preferences across multiple channels ranging from desktop, mobile and even brick-and-mortar stores.
With data on customers’ virtual shopping carts, payment preferences, social profiles, and even internet browsing histories, retailers stand a chance to understand their customers better. But there’s a challenge too: how to gather, store, manage and analyse all of this data to provide better products and services and ultimately create the best customer experience? This is where we’re seeing artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled cloud services come into their own, helping businesses across the region use this information to build the personalised, data-driven and secure customer experience that’s not just a possibility, but an absolute necessity.
More and more customers today expect a personalised, seamless cross-channel approach to their shopping, whether that’s in-store or online. According to Oracle’s recently published Topography of Retail report, 74 per cent of consumers want “knowledgeable in-store staff that could meet their specific needs quickly”, while 64 per cent of consumers from emerging markets including China and India said they loved the idea of virtual reality “try on” apps, for personalised shopping experiences. Imagine looking online for the perfect Christmas gift and then going into a store the next day, to find a shop assistant who points you towards the gift you were looking for. That’s the level of cross-channel expectation we’re gearing towards.

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