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E-COMMERCE CONSUMERS SURVEY 2018
SURVEY LIMITATIONS AND CHALLENGES
In the course of conducting this survey, some limitations and challenges were
encountered. The limitations and challenges are described as follows:
Difficulties to reach required number of samples. For this survey, a total of
35,147 calls were made to achieve 5,348 samples consists of e-Commerce
consumers and non-consumers. Of the total calls made, we received no
response from 54.3% respondents, 5.8% refused to participate and 22.6%
numbers were inactive or invalid numbers. In other words, we have to make
15.4 calls to get one success interview.
Efforts to reach respondents became more difficult when selected CATI
Centre’s telephone numbers were reported as an unwanted call with a mobile
apps named Truecaller. Mobile users used this app to block calls and SMSes
from these unwanted numbers. As a result, we are not able to reach about 48
number of respondents during the survey period.
Samples collected at the state level was only adequate to calculate the level
of e-Commerce adoption for each state due to time and budget constraints.
This limitation has not allowed us to analyse trends and behaviours of e-
Commerce users for each state. Moreover, reaching the number of
respondents in states with small population such as Perlis, W.P. Labuan and
W.P. Putrajaya was proven to be difficult.
Due to the same reasons mentioned above, samples collected at the national
level was only adequate to analyse trend data based on online shopper
behaviours, while core data involves online shoppers and sellers as according
to e-Commerce definition.