Exploring the Needs of Surrogate Shoppers for the Design of a Mobile E-Commerce Platform

Abstract

The role of surrogate shoppers is to assist a buyer resolving any cross-regional language barrier and delivery restrictions during the purchase process In addition to purchasing goods from traditional stores surrogate shoppers are also searching buying and selling goods on e-commerce platforms From the perspective of surrogate shoppers this study explores whether there are any special demands during the purchase process and whether there is any difficulty using the e-commerce platforms The goal of this research is to resolve those problems encountered by surrogate shoppers This study begins by first selecting the representative e-commerce platforms most commonly used by the surrogate shoppers Then semi-structured interviews are conducted with five professional surrogate shoppers who discuss their poor experience as surrogate shoppers using the services provided by the existing e-commerce platforms Next professional surrogate shoppers visual designers and software engineers are asked to participate in designing an ideal solution for the e-commerce platforms Finally 32 users with e-commerce purchasing experience are invited to evaluate a prototyped user interface design and the resultant evaluation will be used to verify whether the needs of a user are met Through the above research process the results show that the users in general gave positive feedback on the prototyped interface with the newly added functions The study finds that the surrogate shoppers have a higher demand for new functions in search capability price comparison product availability information and deposit settings (1) In regard to search capability the search results should be displayed in the listing format for quick browsing (2) In regard to price comparison users should be enabled to price-compare the products that meet their requirements and subsequently display the store product information (3) In regard to product availability such information should be updated according to the demand (4) In regard to deposit setting the new function should allow users to set the deposit amount based on the percentage of the purchase amount or the number of purchases accordingly At the concluding remarks in addition to presenting relevant design suggestions for the functions and the user interfaces of an e-commerce platform this study also provides the recommended methods to select the existing e-commerce platforms for surrogate shoppers

Date of Award	2021
Original language	English
Supervisor	Yu-Hsiu Hung (Supervisor)