Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
1.
Introduction
In recent years, a social media phenomenon called blogshops has sprung up and
become a prevalent aspect of the e-commerce scene in some parts of Southeast
Asia. The term blogshop refer to simple online retail shops created out of freely
available blogging software such as Blogger (or Blogspot), LiveJournal, Word Press,
Tumblr and other similar self-publishing templates, and is almost exclusively found in
the Singapore and Malaysia regions. Sometimes referred to as online boutiques,
e-boutiques, e-shops or simply online shops, the vast majority of blogshops
feature fashion themes and have become a part of the fashion scene in these
regions.
Blogshop websites can usually be easily identified by the .blogspot, .wordpress, and
other blog tags in their URLs, which indicate their hosted domains and which easily
tells them apart from most conventional e-retail websites.
Their layout,
functionalities, and navigation are usually blog-like, with reverse chronological
arrangement of content, use of labels or tags, and use of customizable plug-ins such
as chat boxes, traffic feeds and links. Blogshops are largely associated with social
media. Following the uptake in social media usage in the region toward the latter
half of the 2000 decade, shops enacted on blogs have garnered increasing
popularity among Web users. The arrival of Facebook as a popular social networking
destination has also seen the appearance in large numbers of these forms of online
retailing entities, wherein they are sometimes referred to as Facebook stores,
Facebook boutiques or Facebook blogshops.
Rodney Lim, Faculty of Business and Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Malaysia. Email:
rlim@swinburne.edu.my
Dr. Justo Diaz, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak,
Malaysia. Email: djamador@fit.unimas.my
Dr. Debiprasad Dash, Faculty of Business and Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Malaysia.
Email: ddash@swinburne.edu.my
2.
3.
Background
The emergence of the blogshop, can be contextualized within the Internet economy
in Southeast Asia, and within the wider aspects of e-commerce, blogging and social
media. The arrival of the Internet coupled with the rapid adoption of personal
computers in the 1990s gave rise to the dotcoms, or Web-based start-up ventures
that were created to exploit entrepreneurial potential of the World Wide Web. It was
in this time period that electronic commerce, or e-commerce rose in prominence.
4
Blogging is believed to have begun in the late 1990s (Blood, 2000) as a relatively
exclusive activity involving arduous hand coding of Hypertext Markup Language
(HTML) to create web pages. The rapid uptake of blogging occurred around 1999
with the development of automated Web publishing tools such as Pitas, Blogger and
Groksoup (Blood, 2000 , Blood, 2004). These easy-to-use blogging tools enabled
the average person to create and distribute content without technical knowledge of
HTML, Extensible Markup Language (XML) or other programming languages to
manually code websites.
In recent years, blogging and social media-driven activities have grown sensationally
across the globe. Blogging, for instance, has become a mainstream activity on the
Internet, as evidenced by the estimated 181 million blogs on the Internet by the end
of 2011, an increase from just 26 million in 2006 (NM Incite, 2012). Social
networking continues to grow rapidly, and is now the most popular online activity
(comScore, 2011a). In October 2011, social networking websites recorded 1.2
billion global users, which represented 82 percent of the worlds online population. It
also accounted for about 20 percent of all time spent online, up from a mere six
percent in 2007 (comScore, 2011a ). Facebook is the single most popular social
networking destination, with over one billion users as of October 2012 (Zuckerberg,
2010) and accounts for one in every seven minutes spent online (comScore, 2012).
4.
The emergence of blogshops in the Malaysia and Singapore region also coincided
with a period of rapid e-commerce growth in the region. From 2001 to 2005 for
instance, yearly e-commerce growth rates in Malaysia ranged from 75 percent and
123 percent, and stabilized at a steady average of 24.6 percent from 2006 to 2010
6
In the past, most Asian countries, including Malaysia and Singapore, trailed the
United States and Europe in e-commerce spending. In 1999, at the height of the
dotcom boom for instance, the US accounted for 62 percent of all e-commerce
spending totalling USD130.5 billion globally, while the Asia-Pacific region
commanded just two percent of this figure (IDC, 2000). The total value of ecommerce transactions in Singapore in 1999 was estimated at S$1.9 billion, which
represented just 0.1 percent of total turnover in the economy (Chia, 2000). Similarly,
Malaysias spending of about RM57 million on e-commerce purchases in 1998 was
relatively small in relation to her GDP of RM372 billion (Khatibi et al., 2003).
Although comprehensive records on the scale of the blogshop-sphere and its actual
contribution to overall e-commerce are not available, data from several sources
suggests that blogshops are quietly emerging to become an important aspect of the
online retailing scene in the Southeast Asia region. Statistics compiled by a popular
blog software platform called LifeJournal in 2011 provide an indication of the size
and significance of the blogshop market in Singapore. LiveJournal claims that it is
host to more than 50,000 blogshops in Singapore, and that 480,000 or nearly half of
the 1.2 million monthly visits to its blog platform are for the purposes of online
shopping on these blogshops (Webwire, 2011). According to Roshni Mahtani, CEO
of Tickled Media, the publisher of LiveJournal in the Southeast Asian markets,
LiveJournal-hosted blogshops generated USD72 million worth of transactions in
Singapore in 2011 (Singapore Business Review, 2011). This figure represents six
percent of the countrys forecasted e-commerce volume of USD1.2 billion in 2011
and suggests the significance of LiveJournal as a major e-commerce player in the
country. Following this, LiveJournal has responded by converting its blogging and
social media platform into a full e-commerce facility that supports product catalogue,
shopping cart and online payment (SUP Media, 2012)
Although similar statistics on other major blog services such as Blogger and Word
Press are not available, these developments suggest that collectively, blogshops
probably constitute a vast and significant albeit largely under-recognized force that
drives e-commerce in the region, especially taking into consideration the general
belief that Blogger is an even more popular platform than LiveJournal for blogshops.
5.
Literature Review
The transformative potential of the blog and the blogshop can be seen within the
wider areas of social media. Social media has been described as a group of
Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological
foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user generated
content (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). It incorporates a range of Internet-based
social applications that include blogs, social networking sites such as Facebook,
content communities such as YouTube, collaborative projects such as Wikipedia and
virtual social worlds and games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft
respectively (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010).
These technologies and platforms
provide distributed networks and online spaces that make up the social software, or
software used to support group interactions (Shirky, 2003). The resulting online
social relations constitute a social Web that forms the basis of much Internet based
activity including online shopping, entertainment, and learning.
The empowering effects of user generated content in the Southeast Asian region can
be seen in its impact on the social-political scene in Malaysia and Singapore. The
influence of social media, especially blogging, on the outcomes of the national
elections in Singapore in 2006 and Malaysia in 2008 has received much analysis
and discussion (Tang, 2009, Lee and Kan, 2009, Ulicny, 2008, Sani and Zengeni,
2010), while its central role in grassroots political activism continues to attract much
interest (Ahmad et al., 2012).
Social medias versatility is seen in its ability to accommodate social interactions on
a diverse range of professional and leisurely subject matter, topics, and interests, via
formats such as blogs, forums and other socially-oriented sites. Technorati, the
Internet search engine for blogs, categorizes the blogosphere into Entertainment,
Business, Sports, Politics, Autos, Technology, Green, Living and Science sections in
its directory (http://technorati.com/blogs/directory/). Among scholarly circles, blogs
have been classified according to their function, that is, for interpersonal
communication, intrapersonal communication or professional reputation (Trammell
and Gasser, 2004) and according to the nature of the content, that is, personal
content in journal-style blogs versus topical content in filter-style blogs (Herring et al.,
2004, Hopkins, 2010b).
Between these, personal blogs that take the form of
personal journals are the more popular genre of blogs (Herring et al., 2004).
In Malaysia and Singapore, a type of personal blog that has been extremely popular
is the lifestyle blog (Hopkins, 2010b), wherein the author blogs about personal
interests, activities, experiences and social events such as parties, travelling, and so
on. Consequently, lifestyle blogs typically feature themes of food, shopping,
gadgets, fashion and various hobbies. Examples of popular lifestyle bloggers are
Cheeserland (http://cheeserland.com/) in Malaysia and Xia Xue in Singapore
(http://xiaxue.blogspot.com/).
The common ground that blogshops appear to occupy in the fashion and online
shopping domains suggests that blogshops either intersects with or are a subset of
the lifestyle blog. Both are personal in nature and feature content that reflects the
blog owners personal interests. Yet, the overt selling in blogshops departs sharply
from the lifestyle and other blog genres.
The main study from which this paper is derived uses a Grounded Theory
methodology to study the blogshop phenomenon in Malaysia and Singapore. In
Grounded Theory, instead of applying a pre-formulated hypothesis to test data, data
are collected for the purposes of building a theory in the substantive area under
investigation. A key premise of Grounded Theory Methodology is all is data (Glaser
and Strauss, 1967), which encourages the researcher to use a wide range of
qualitative and quantitative data from myriad data sources to help in the
conceptualization of the substantive area under study. Following this methodology,
this pilot study presents analysis of empirical data to derive patterns about the nature
and characteristics of blogshops.
The main sources of data from which the findings in this study are derived from
include interviews and casual conversations with blogshop participants, news
articles, as well as observations of blogshop sites based on an exploratory online
survey of blogshops conducted in late 2010 and early 2011 involving a sample of
250 blogshops randomly selected from listings of Malaysian and Singaporean
blogshops in online blogshop directories. Out of this sample, 160 blogshops were
identifiable as Singaporean-based, 52 were Malaysian-based and 38 did not indicate
where they were from. In the online survey of blogshop sites, observations were
made and recorded about the prominent features displayed on their sites, such as
methods to place an order, payment modes, and so on. Selected findings from
analysis of the various data sources are presented in the next section.
7.
Findings
Analysis of the selected blogshops sites uncover the following unique features which
are presented below in terms of the blogshops ownership characteristics, the
structure of their business, product and market scope, geographical clustering, the
reorientation of common Web-based tools meant for blogging and social networking
for commerce and the de-automation of transaction processes.
10
Number
77
28
9
136
Percentage
31
11
4
54
Number
237
13
250
Percentage
94.8
5.2
100
11
Observations of blogshop sites indicate that most blogshops carry narrow product
ranges, usually four categories or less. Some operates as specialty stores that offer
specialized merchandise that are themed in some way. For instance, a blogshop
may be devoted to a specific product category or type, such as ladies footwear,
bags, shoes, or a particular fashion motif such as Korean or Taiwanese fashion, or
the fashion needs of a particular customer group such as Muslim ladies and so on.
Others may deal in two or more categories of a themed item, such as Korean-Pop
(or K-Pop) styled clothing and accessories. Some blogshop owners operate multiple
blogshop sites with each blogshop dedicated to a specific product category.
Number of different
product categories
1 category
2 4 categories
More than 4 categories
Total
Number
Percentage
45
122
83
250
18.0
48.8
33.2
100
Number
166
84
250
Percentage
66.4
33.6
100
12
Blogger (or Blogspot) appears to be the most popular choice of blog platform used to
host blogshop sites, with over 72 percent of the observed sample of blogshop sites
using this template, as seen in the following figures.
Platform host URLs
Blogger(Blogspot)
LiveJournal
WordPress
Other blog templates
Non-blog templates
Total
Number
182
9
6
18
35
250
Percentage
72.8
3.6
2.4
7.2
14.0
100
The specific types of blog software used to host blogshops appear to vary in different
regions. For instance, Blogger, LiveJournal and WordPress seem to be most
13
Social media is also used by blogshop owners to facilitate non-selling functions such
as promotions and communication, to support the main selling activities. For
instance, Twitter is used by some blogshop owners to update followers, while the
popular video sharing site You Tube is used by some blogshop owners to share
promotional messages. By late 2009, many Malaysian and Singaporean blogshops
began flocking to the social networking site Facebook. Established blogshops have
been erecting storefronts on Facebook while maintaining their blogshop sites, while
many newly-established online shops have opted to operate completely on
Facebook and without a blog site. Like the classic blogshop, owners of these online
stores on Facebook improvise features meant for social networking for online selling
purposes. Owners appear to take advantage of their personal networks, or social
graph and to tag persons associated with their contacts as a means to set up a
market base. These Facebook-based stores are commonly referred to as Facebook
blogshops, Facebook boutiques or Facebook online shops. The mass migration
to Facebook suggests an evolutionary nature of blogshops as they adapt to various
emergent forms of online tools to facilitate their activities. The following figures show
the presence of blogshops on other forms of social media other than blogs.
Social media types
Facebook
Twitter
You Tube
Total
Number
117
40
6
163
Percentage
71.8
3.6
2.4
100
That the majority of blogshops accomplish key online selling functions such as
product listings, order taking, payment, and product deliveries with improvised
substitute processes is a defining characteristic of the blogshop and a critical
departure point from conventional e-commerce systems. Where an automated
shopping cart allows the buyer to simply click on guided options to accomplish a
checkout task, blogshops utilize a range of substitutes such as order forms, email,
online chat systems, short-messaging-service or even phone calls to complete an
online order. Most of these facilities are freely available online as plug-ins.
Ordering mechanisms
Email
Online forms
Shopping carts
Comment boxes and chat
Phone and text messaging
Others
Total
Number
176
77
26
8
18
10
315
Percentage
55.9
24.4
8.3
2.5
5.7
3.2
100
Where payment gateways such as PayPal or credit card processing facilities are the
standard devices to process online payments in most e-commerce systems, most
blogshops utilize electronic bank transfers and cash-on-delivery payment modes.
Payment Methods
PayPal
Credit cards
Bank transfers
Cash-on-delivery
Others
Total
Number
65
19
198
105
12
399
Percentage
16.3
4.8
49.6
26.3
3.0
100
Similarly, where typical e-commerce systems mostly rely on the postal services to
deliver goods bought, many blogshop owners offer multiple delivery options. A
preference to meet up in person with buyers to consummate transactions enables
buyers to check the goods and pay in cash, which circumvents electronic payment.
15
Number
265
221
99
585
Percentage
45.3
37.8
16.9
100
In summary, these characteristics suggest that the blogshop as an entity has been
designed for simplicity, low cost and ease of use. They suggest the presence of a
type of business entity formulated from clever improvisations of simple technological
tools and social networking functionalities to substitute for conventional means of
doing business. As a result of its low cost, or even cost-free set up and ease of
use, it is capable of enabling mass access to business participation by many fashion
enthusiasts. Its disposable nature is reflected in the flexible manner in which it may
be terminated. Thus, these characteristics suggest the blogshop as a potential
business form that is capable of operating in a distinctly different manner from
conventional Internet-based businesses.
16
References
1. Abidin, C. & Thompson, E. C., 2012. Buymylife. com: Cyber-femininities and
commercial intimacy in blogshops. Women's Studies International Forum,
35 467-477.
2. Ahmad, F., Kee, C.P., Mustaffa, N., Ibrahim, F., Mahmud, W.a.W. & Dafrizal, D.,
2012. Information propagation and the forces of social media in Malaysia.
Asian Social Science, 8, 71-76.
3. Ameur, E., Brassard, G. & Paquet, S., 2003. Using personal knowledge
publishing to facilitate sharing across communities. In: GURSTEIN, M., ed.
Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on (Virtual) Community
Informatics: Electronic Support for Communities - Local, Virtual and
Communities of Practice, 2003 Budapest.
4. BBC, 2004. 'Blog' picked as word of the year. BBC [Online]. Available:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4059291.stm.
5. Bernama, 2010. Dewan Rakyat: 2 million bloggers proof of media freedom in
country [Online]. Malaysian National News Agency. Available:
http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v6/newsindex.php?id=506688
[Accessed 11 November 2012.
6. Blood, R., 2000. Weblogs: A history and perspective [Online]. Available:
http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html [Accessed 12
October 2012.
17
18
19
20
21