Rakuten TARAD.com focuses on 40-plus women

The targeted campaign follows on from the success of the Thai online market-place’s campaign to capture more business in the gay-community market, which is expected to contribute to overall revenue growth of 40 per cent this year.

Pawoot Pongvitayapanu, managing director of Rakuten TARAD.com, said the company had conducted the “Rakuten Smart Shopping Survey” among more than 2,000 online consumers in Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. 

The survey found that less than 25 per cent of people across the four markets claim to have shopped online without any regrets. 

Almost half of the respondents attributed their dissatisfaction to products looking different when they arrive from what they had been led to believe when shopping online. 

Moreover, 86 per cent of consumers in Taiwan and 84 per cent in Indonesia were “most dissatisfied” with their online shopping experience. 

The survey also found that Asian consumers’ payment preferences vary from region to region, highlighting how important it is for retailers to support a range of payment options.

Credit and debit cards are favoured by 57 per cent of Taiwanese online shoppers, while e-wallet payment services are least favoured in Taiwan, at only 5 per cent. 

Meanwhile, Indonesian online shoppers have a clear preference and will take PayPal, AliPay and other e-wallet services over other payment methods. 

For Thai consumers, preference is nearly equally split among cash and delivery (36 per cent), credit and debit cards (33 per cent) and e-wallet services (31 per cent).

Pawoot said that by the end of the year the company would come out with a new segment campaign, aimed at encouraging more women aged 40 and over to shop via the online arena. 

It will also pursue a marketing strategy via mobile devices, due to the increased use of smart phones and tablets for accessing information and shopping while on the go. 

Meanwhile, Rakuten TARAD.com will also rebrand to support the global market and the regional market under the upcoming Asean Economic Community, he added. 

“We have had success in providing an online segment marketing campaign to support the gay community via our ‘Gay Day Campaign’, which focused on 200,000 Facebook users. Our [normal] marketing campaigns can reach totally 1,300 press [outlets], but during this campaign we were able to increase revenue growth for online shopping in our market place, which resulted in the delivery of products and services for gay consumers increasing by about 200 per cent,” said Pawoot.

The company now has around 2 million members and more than 5,700 online shops registered at Rakuten TARAD.com.

“I think the e-commerce market in Thailand has more opportunity for growth, since there is room for newcomers. It also has only five ‘big brother’ online market places and less competition in the market [than in other counties]. Therefore, I expect that in the next few years international market places such as Amazon will jump into the Thai e-commerce market,” said the managing director.