An Exploratory Review of Malaysian E-Commerce Merchants and Their Readiness in Adopting Business Analytics Models for Assessment of Business KPIs

Abstract

In recent years, E-commerce business has become the norm in Malaysia, especially since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, with increasing number of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) joining in. As more and more Malaysian business merchants jumped onto the bandwagon, most of them only managed to setup basic websites, with basic databases to store transactional and customer data. However, when the merchants needed to further analyze customer purchasing patterns or any other aspects of demographic behavior, they found that it could not be done due to missing or incomplete data. Therefore, the objective of this research was to explore the current readiness of the merchants' data collection policies in taking advantage of business analytics. A study was conducted to review the data privacy policies of 32 E-commerce merchants to understand the types of data collected by the merchants. Furthermore, mapping was done to check on whether the collected data is sufficient enough to apply in specific analytical models to review the churn rate, conversion rate and customer lifetime value of the E-commerce customers. The study showed that most merchants had only collected enough information to conduct basic business analytics. As a result, this exploratory study managed to devise a data analytic model, with the relevant data types, that can be used by E-commerce merchants to collect and leverage data to conduct more in-depth analytics to better understand their customers.