Online Shopping in Nepal: Preferences and Problems

Abstract

The popularity of online shopping among Nepalese customers has increased with the cost-reduction of technology-based goods, the cost of internet services, and easy access to the internet. At the same time, the convenient modes of payments, and user-friendly, as well as, interactive shopping apps are further paving a pathway to unprecedented growth in the online shopping companies. The online shopping companies in Nepal have been seen following the Business to Consumer (B2C), Customer to Customer (C2C), or the ‘Facebook Store’ business model. The paper has taken 300 respondents, as a sample, who have at least twice shopping experiences, from a single online shopping company. The multiple-choice question, and open-end questions related to the preference, and problems faced were asked while going for online shopping in Nepal. In context to Nepal, time-saving, offers, easy ordering system and information available at the online shopping portal, were the main reasons for the shoppers, to prefer online shopping. The service quality provided by the online company, made the Nepalese customer, prefer online shopping. The quality of the product delivered to the customer was seen to be the major problem in Nepalese online shopping. The delivery of the wrong product was also seen one of the problems in online shopping in Nepal.

Factors Affecting Online Shopping Behaviour of Boutique Products in Kathmandu Valley

“…Nepalese online shoppers choose online shopping from a status firm, so firm reputation (β=0.306) is the major influencing factor of online shopping behaviour of boutique products followed by ease of use, trust, and price. Hence, ease of use, trust, firm reputation, product varieties, and price are the main grounds for Internet shopping which is much easier to compare products online (Ahmad, 2018;Rahman et al, 2018;Vaidya, 2019). However, the P-value of price is not significant.…”

“…Most designers now communicate with their clients via their websites or social media accounts such as Facebook, Whatsapp, Viber, and Instagram. The rise of online business has also made the market more competitive (Kharel, 2018;Vaidya, 2019). However, there are lots of problems faced by boutiques in Nepal.…”

“…In the same year, Pizza Hut launched an online ordering system for pizza. Amazon began selling books online in 1995, and eBay, an American multinational corporation and e-commerce firm, began offering consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales services over the Internet in 1996 (Vaidya, 2019).…”

“…Daraz, a Pakistan-based e-commerce company, acquired Kaymu in July 2016, and Alibaba Group, a Chinese-owned e-commerce company, acquired Daraz in May 2018 and has been operating in the Nepalese market in the Business-to-Consumer (B2C) model of business in online companies. Most of the company interact with consumers either through their websites or through social media accounts like Facebook, Instagram (Vaidya, 2019). This online shopping not only provide daily usages, foodstuffs, electronic goods, and clothing but also trendy clothing.…”

Omnichannel Heuristics for E-commerce

“…Each year new e-commerce enters the Nepal market, mostly with websites and app versions in parallel. It was found that the majority of Nepalese customers face issues when using e-commerce (Vaidya, 2019) which is believed to have much more potentials than what it is offering at the moment by using UCD during development of the e-commerce applications. It was found from interviews conducted with Nepalese UX designers that in most cases the design of websites was transformed into its app versions without doing proper research on it.…”