Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
25 - 26 February 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-19-1
Making Shops from Blogs: An Emerging Online Retailing
Phenomenon in Southeast Asia
Rodney Lim, Justo Amador Diaz and Debiprasad Dash
Operating as mini online shops hosted on freely available
social media such as blogs and social networking sites,
blogshops have quietly emerged to become significant
platforms for mass participation in e-commerce in Singapore
and Malaysia. This paper introduces the blogshop and
establishes it as the development of a unique socially-oriented
approach to e-commerce. It reports findings from a pilot study
that describes its unique attributes and the way they operate.
JEL Codes: L10, M31
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
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Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
25 - 26 February 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-19-1
Thus, extensions of such a practice to social networking sites such as Facebook,
suggests a broader application of the term is necessary to account for other forms of
social media.
At the same time, this practice of using blogs and other social media for e-commerce
purposes can also be found in other Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia,
Thailand, the Philippines and Brunei. Although the term „blogshop‟ itself is usually
not used in these regions, the characteristic manner in which they employ social
media tools, their behaviours, practices and their focus on fashion associates them
with the Malaysian-Singaporean blogshop.
The essential nature of the blogshop is its use of the blog as a trading platform
(Fletcher and Greenhill, 2009). That its owner would forgo a conventional ecommerce system for a crude facility improvised from an apparatus originally
designed for personal publication purposes underlines an innovative yet curiously
deviationist method to commerce.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes a
„blog‟ as a website that contains an online personal journal with reflections,
comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer, and „blogging‟ as a noun.
The word „blog‟ itself is a contraction of „weblog‟ a term coined in 1997 by Jorn
Barger to describe “a Web page where a Web logger „logs‟ all the other Web pages
she finds interesting” (Blood, 2004). Blogs have been described as personal
websites (Blood, 2004) that feature personal editorship, hyperlinked posts structure,
free public access to content, (Aïmeur et al., 2003) and are built on “frequently
modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological
sequence” (Herring et al., 2004).
Despite its pervasiveness, academic studies into blogshops as an e-commerce
system have been relatively lacking. This paper presents empirically based findings
from a pilot study that is a part of a broader and on-going research project to study
the phenomenon. Its purpose is to investigate into the underlying key attributes of
the blogshop format found in Malaysia and Singapore to establish it as an approach
to e-commerce that is distinguishable from conventional forms of e-commerce.
This paper first introduces the blogshop phenomenon by clarifying what is meant by
blogshops. It provides a background of blogshops by exploring the context of its
emergence within the development of the Internet economy, e-commerce and the
popularity of Web 2.0 and social media. It is followed by a review of the available
literature on blogshops, as well as the wider areas of social media, blogging, ecommerce and social commerce. The research methodology is then outlined,
followed by a discussion of findings from data collected. Finally, the significance of
the findings and recommendations for future research into this area are highlighted.
2.
What are Blogshops?
The manner in which common blogging apparatus is used by blogshop owners to
accomplish a commercial purpose that is distinctively different from what it is
originally intended for marks a distinguishing characteristic of the blogshop.
Blogshop practitioners recognize blogshops as the direct selling of wares off the blog
platform, which is discernible from conventional blogging which is the use of blog
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Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
25 - 26 February 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-19-1
software to create, publish and share digital content. With blogshops, the blog tool is
re-oriented to enact an online selling platform. Content creation in typical blogging
usually focuses on text and multimedia elements, and contrasts sharply with the
selling of goods and related business oriented activities in blogshops. In addition,
the persons behind blogshops are called shop owners rather than bloggers, although
a blogger may also be a blogshop owner, and vice-versa.
Blogging and blogshopping do not appear to be mutually exclusive, as the activities
of blogging and selling may easily overlap. An instance where this occurs is the
„blog sale,‟ an intermediate form that combines the fashion-themed blog with
occasional „blog sales‟ of the owner‟s personal belongings, usually beauty items.
Blog sales resemble blogshops in that they incorporate many of the transaction
mechanisms seen in classic blogshop types. In these forms, fashion blogging
appears to be the prime concern, with selling as an incidental activity.
While it is quite common for bloggers to derive monetary benefits from their work, the
mechanisms usually employed are very different from the outright selling of physical
goods on blogshops. In conventional blogging, opportunities for revenue generation
are usually available through schemes such as affiliate marketing, advertising
programs such as Google‟s Adsense, paid posts, and so on, and are not necessarily
a primary goal for the majority of bloggers. The prime activity of a blogshop,
however, is the outright generation of revenues through direct sales of goods.
Fletcher & Greenhill (2009) acknowledged that a technology-based definition of
blogshops that emphasizes their hosting on blogging systems belies the complexities
regarding their practice. They noted the “anthropologically complex and rich
environment that brings together a form of economic need, locational circumstance,
technological capacity and non-ethical consumer engagement where business
adaptation is drawn upon for personal benefit” (Fletcher and Greenhill, 2009). They
observed teen-owned blogshops in Singapore and highlighted a number of
distinguishing features of these types of online stores in Singapore.
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Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
25 - 26 February 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-19-1
Figure 1. Examples of blogshop websites: a fashion-themed blogshop (top), and a
blogshop found in Facebook (bottom).
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.
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Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
25 - 26 February 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-19-1
Electronic commerce refers to the use of the Internet to facilitate, execute and
process transactions (DeLone and McLean, 2004), and represented a major force
behind the New Economy. Driven by the capabilities of the new digital medium and
the promise of a new economic landscape, dotcoms spurred an e-commerce boom
during the latter part of the decade. However, the dotcom frenzy culminated in a
stock market bubble that eventually imploded in 2001. Nevertheless, the decline of
the dotcoms has not diminished the significance of the Internet economy as ecommerce has continued to thrive in the new millennium. Global e-commerce sales
increased from USD130.5 billion in May 1999 (IDC, 2003) to USD680 billion in 2011,
and are projected to hit USD963 billion by 2013 (JP Morgan, 2011). Also, many
start-ups from that period, such as eBay and Amazon, did not only survive, but have
thrived with business models and propositions that are deeply rooted in the Internet.
The end of the dotcom era also marked the emergence of „Web 2.0‟, a term coined
by Tim O‟Reilly (O‟Reilly, 2005), founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc. at the
O‟Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference in 2004. Web 2.0 describes the continuing
evolution of the Web into a more mature and distinctive „next generation of the
Internet‟ based on a set of economic, social and technological trends that enable
user participation, openness and network effects (Musser, 2006). Where the early
Web had primarily been a static medium featuring passive consumption by users of
content created by Webmasters and paid professionals, Web 2.0 architecture utilizes
the Web as a platform so that users become active in the creation, collaboration,
sharing, and tagging of content (O‟Reilly, 2005). As such, Web 2.0 emphasizes the
social dimension in the development of the Web, and is usually closely associated
with „social media.‟
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 world‟s 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).
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Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
25 - 26 February 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-19-1
Southeast Asian countries are enormous users of social media, including blogs.
According to eMarketer (2012), the number of social network users in Asia-Pacific is
expected to reach 615 million in 2012 and 853 million in 2014. They spend the bulk
of their online leisure time on social networking (TNS, 2011), particularly in Malaysia
where social networking accounts for one third of all time spent online and where as
high as 80 percent of all Malaysian Internet users are on Facebook (comScore,
2011b). Additionally, Malaysians are the heaviest users of social networking. They
spend nine hours a week on social networking sites and have an average of 233
friends in their social network (TNS, 2010) which is 80 percent higher than the global
benchmark. Similarly, blogging is a popular activity in Malaysia, with estimates of
the number of bloggers ranging from the hundreds of thousands (Hopkins, 2010a) to
as high as 2 million by the Malaysian Information, Communication and Culture
Minister, Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim (Bernama, 2010).
4.
Emergence and Significance of Blogshops
Although an absence of documentation of the historical development of blogshops
makes it difficult to pin point their first appearance, an examination of the word
„blogshop‟ on Google Trends as shown in Figure 2 below suggests that the term was
first recorded before or around 2005, and that it rose in popularity around 2008-2009.
An approximate placing of the beginnings of blogshops in the 2004-2005 timeframe
collaborates with observations by Shi (2008) and Communicateasia (2010). It aligns
blogshops with the period where the public prominence of blogs and the blogging
culture was recognized (BBC, 2004, Pew, 2005). Secondly, the Google Trends
record shows that blogshops probably originated in Singapore or Malaysia, and that
the term was not detected in other places until later when it appeared in places such
as Indonesia, Brunei and Australia.
Figure 2: Tracking of the term „blogshop‟ on Google Trends
(Source: Google Trends)
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
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Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
25 - 26 February 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-19-1
(Frost and Sullivan, 2006, in Kamaruzaman and Handrich 2010, ). By 2010, the size
of the Malaysian online shopping market had reached RM1.8 billion, and is expected
to hit RM5 billion by 2014 (PayPal, 2010).
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,
Malaysia‟s 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).
In the years following however, e-commerce grew rapidly in Asia-Pacific and by
2006, the region had accounted an estimated 14 percent of all e-commerce
revenues (Frost and Sullivan, 2006, in Kamaruzaman and Handrich 2010).
Furthermore, a JP Morgan report showed that its compound annual growth rate of
27.5 percent (compared to 13.2 percent for Europe and 12.4 percent for the US) will
propel it to become the largest e-commerce market by 2013 with estimated ecommerce sales of over USD323 billion (JP Morgan, 2011).
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 country‟s 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)
Meanwhile, similar developments have occurred recently with Multiply, another
popular blogging and social networking platform that has become the largest online
market in Indonesia and the Philippines. In Indonesia, Multiply’s platform supports
over 90,000 sellers and 7 million unique monthly visitors (Multiply, 2012), while in the
Philippines, it is home to over 120,000 online stores (PR Web, 2012). In recognizing
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Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
25 - 26 February 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-19-1
the significance of the Southeast Asian markets to the company was highlighted
when it made the decision in May 2012 to move its head office from the US to
Jakarta (Russell, 2012). To support the online retailing activities of its users, Multiply
upgraded its platform to provide a proper e-commerce system, by providing
shopping cart features that support inventory management, detailed product listings
and tracking, as well as automated payment options (Periabras, 2012). In a further
move, Multiply announced that it would transition completely from social networking
into an e-commerce market (David, 2012). An official statement indicated on the
Multiply blog that the decision was a response to customers in Southeast Asia who
were using Multiply as a trading platform to buy and sell goods, which surprised
them since it was against their terms of service at the time (The Multiply Blog, 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
To date, a small handful of academic publications on blogshops can be found.
Fletcher and Greenhill‟s (2009) publication introduced the phenomenon as a largely
teenage-centred activity in Singapore, and subsequently explored its innovative and
organic user-oriented design (Greenhill and Fletcher, 2011). They recognized it as a
„new reformulation of e-commerce‟ attributed its rise to readily available digital
technologies, efficient urban public transport system and the influence of fashion on
popular culture (Fletcher and Greenhill, 2009). Another recent publication studied
the Singaporean blogshop in terms of „cyber-femininities‟ and „commercial
intimacies‟ (Abidin and Thompson, 2012). Other published studies have examined
blogshops in relation to trust issues (Shafie et al., 2011), customer loyalty aspects
(Ng and Matanda, 2008) and e-service quality (Ng and Matanda, 2009).
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.
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Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
25 - 26 February 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-19-1
User-generated content underlies the transformative capabilities of social media. The
impact of user-generated content in blogs and social media has attracted interest
and discussion in areas such as journalism (Wall, 2005, Newman, 2009, de Zúñiga
et al., 2011), politics (Wallsten, 2005, Kline, 2005), and education (Downes, 2004,
Harris and Rea, 2009, Boulos et al., 2006, Williams and Jacobs, 2004, McLoughlin
and Lee, 2007). Blogs have been utilized in many business (see Air Asia‟s Tony
Fernandes CEO Blog, http://www.tonyfernandesblog.com/) and non-profit
organization settings, (see Salvation Army blog, http://blog.salvationarmyusa.org/ ).
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 media‟s 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.
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Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
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6.
Research Aims and Methodology
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.
A blogshop website is a natural setting where its business processes can be
observed in a non-intrusive manner. The characteristic nature of the blogshop is
observable in the features of its business and its patterns of behaviour that are
prominently displayed on blogshop websites. In acting as an online storefront, a
blogshop site contains rich and readily available data about the business, its
processes and participants. It acts as a highly visible public showcase of its
business wherein the blogshop‟s activities are continuously recorded, archived and
made accessible to all. Thus, the blogshop site was chosen as the primary source
this enquiry as it allows for close observations and grounded analysis of data
pertaining to how its operates as a business entity. It allowed for generation of
quantitative data that was complemented with data from other sources such as
interviews, conversations, analysis of news articles and so on.
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 blogshop‟s 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.
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Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
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7.1 Ownership Characteristics
The small-scale nature of blogshops is reflected in their ownership characteristics
and the scope of their activities. Where the number of owners were determinable
from observations of blogshop sites observed, most blogshops are seen to be owned
by one or two persons as shown in the table below.
Number of owners
One
Two
More than Two
Unknown
Number
77
28
9
136
Percentage
31
11
4
54
Most blogshops also feature small transactions, as reported in a LiveJournal survey
of shops hosted on its blog platform. Its study showed that blogshops averaged
eight transactions per month with a per-item sales price of S$20, and that 80% of the
blogshops made less than S$500 a month (Singapore Business Review, 2011).
In Malaysia, blogshops bearing these characteristics would be classified by the
Malaysian National SME Development Council (NSDC) as small enterprises (or
commonly referred to as SMEs) or micro-businesses (2011). Small enterprises are
defined as enterprises with sales turnovers of between RM200,000 and RM1 million,
or with between 5 and 19 full-time employees, while micro-enterprises are defined as
businesses employing less than five employees and with annual revenues of under
RM200,000 (SME Corp Malaysia, 2011). Similarly, in Singapore, an SME is defined
as an enterprise with an annual sales turnover of under S$100 million, or that
employs less than 200 workers (Chen, 2011).
7.2 Business Structure
The majority of blogshops operate on a home-based business format, where the
blogshop‟s Web-based storefront substitutes a physical outlet. In other instances,
businesses with existing brick-and-mortar retail storefront may add blogshop sites to
complement their operations. Data from observations of blogshop sites show nearly
95 percent of all blogshops in the sample operated as online-only outlets.
Outlets
Online-only
Online and physical store
Total
Number
237
13
250
Percentage
94.8
5.2
100
The majority of blogshops operate as online retailers, although 17 percent of those
surveyed indicated themselves as involved in some form of supplying or
„wholesaling‟ functions, usually to other blogshops. In most instances, these would
mean offering of discounts for bulk sales.
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Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
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Blogshops are also predominantly owned by females and are represented by diverse
age categories. The youngest owners appear to range from early-teen high
schoolers to those in their late teens, as indicated in the survey of blogshop sites
where 20 of the owners in the sample who were aged 14-and-under and 17 owners
were aged 15 to 20. The oldest owners included mothers and retirees. Less than
five percent of the sample of observed blogshops was owned by males. Male-owned
blogshops may be associated with the sales of items geared toward male interests,
such as electronic gadgets.
7.3 Product and Market Scope
In Malaysia and Singapore, blogshops are essentially associated with sales of
consumer goods, primarily fashion. A survey of popular blogshop directories such
as Singapore‟s Blogshopr and Malaysia‟s Blogshop Malaysia finds that fashionthemed blogshops featuring apparel, accessories, bags, beauty, cosmetics and
footwear constitute the biggest categories amidst other product categories such as
babies, education, electronics, food, home décor, kids‟, men‟s, pets, sports, toys,
and other consumer goods.
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
Blogshops appear to focus on customers in their domestic markets. The typical
blogshop usually offers a limited range of products for sale to limited geographic
areas. The localized nature of blogshops is suggested by the following figures, with
66.4 percent of the blogshops observed stating a policy of shipping locally only,
which covers the domestic Malaysia or Singapore areas.
Sales Coverage
Local only
International
Total
Number
166
84
250
Percentage
66.4
33.6
100
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Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
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7.4 Geographic Clustering
In Singapore and Malaysia, the term „blogshop‟ is popularly used to describe blog or
social media-based online outlets, and has become synonymous with small scale
online fashion retailing. Other than these countries, blog or social media-based
stores are present in large numbers throughout Indonesia, the Philippines and
Brunei, which suggests this type of online commerce to be a Southeast Asian
phenomenon. Additionally, the notion of using blogs and other non-conventional
platforms for retailing purposes appears to have spread, in various forms, outside of
these countries. An example is the „blog sales‟ found in the US, as mentioned
previously. However, the „blogshop‟ moniker remains absent in these instances,
which suggests that the term is native to Singapore and Malaysia.
Lastly, the
influence of the Southeast Asian blogshop can be seen in places like Australia,
where the blogshop scene appears to revolve around female Asian student
ownership, features Asian fashion interests and adopts the label „blogshops‟.
Based on these observations, it may be speculated that the Southeast Asian
blogshop has exerted some degree of influence on the practice of diverting social
media tools for e-commerce, even as such developments could have been
simultaneously developed in other parts of the world. At any rate, the blogshop
phenomenon in Singapore and Malaysia represents a potentially significant focal
point in the development of social media applications in e-commerce.
7.5 Re-Oriented Social Media Platforms
An essential mark of the blogshop is its dependence on social media, notably blog
software and social networking sites, to host storefronts. Even as early blogshops
were invariably hosted on blogging software, they began to appear on other sociallyoriented platforms when social media became more widespread, while maintaining
the unique characteristics, practices and designation of the classic blogshop.
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
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popular in Malaysia and Singapore while Multiply is the dominant choice in Indonesia
and the Philippines.
Typically, the blogshop is clearly distinguishable as a stand-alone platform that
serves as the owner‟s official or home site. By utilizing links and networking with
other platforms, the blogshop is able to connect to multiple outlets located on various
destinations, such as online communities, online marketplaces and other sociallyoriented platforms especially those that are devoted to fashion and women, such as
the Cozycot (http://forums.cozycot.com/forum.php#marketplace) and Malaysian
Babes (http://www.malaysianbabes.net/forum/) forums.
Well-known online
marketplaces such as the Malaysian and Singaporean editions of eBay, as well as in
the
ladies‟
trading
section
in
the
popular
Lowyat
forum
(http://forum.lowyat.net/StuffForTheLadies) are also popular outlets for blogshops.
These places help to generate traffic for the blogshop site, as when a link is placed
in the community to enable potential buyers to click out to the blogshop site to
accomplish a transaction. Conversely, the store itself may be embedded within
these marketplaces, to utilize them as the main platforms for online sales.
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
7.6 De-automated Transactional Processes
In re-configuring social media platforms for online selling purposes, most blogshops
circumvent the lack of standard automated facilities typical of e-commerce sites with
manual transaction processes. The heart of many online retailing platforms is the
electronic shopping cart, a software that provide a Web storefront interface with
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shoppers and tools to manage the site. A basic shopping cart application provides
automation for simple purchasing functions such as product selection, shipping
calculation, payment processing and order confirmation. It fulfils click-to-buy actions
and is able to facilitate an entire purchasing task without the involvement of direct
communications between the buyer and the seller. An advanced shopping cart
software features a full range of e-commerce application to enable complete online
store building and management systems, and is able to support complex
applications such as inventory management, customer support and merchandising.
It provides the tools to build and manage an entire online store, including the store
catalogue, the look and feel of the store and the back-end administrative tasks.
Automated shopping cart systems such as these embody the convenience and
efficiency associated with online shopping, and are usually associated with the term
„e-commerce websites.‟
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.
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Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
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Delivery methods
Postal service deliveries
Meet-ups
Courier service deliveries
Total
Number
265
221
99
585
Percentage
45.3
37.8
16.9
100
7.7 Business Activity and Longevity
A blogshop‟s business activities may range from very frequent and high volume to
intermittent and low volume. Some blogshops appear to be constantly active in that
the pages are updated frequently and new stocks are regularly posted. Others show
intermittent activities, while some show long periods of dormancy.
Blogshops also demonstrate various degrees of longevity. Through the course of
this project, a large number of blogshops were encountered in various states of defunction. Some were declared to be in some form of closure, from „permanent
closure‟, to „temporary closure‟, to „closed for renovation,‟ to „relocation to new
blogshop‟, to outright abandonment. The survey showed that 29 out of the 250
blogshop sites, or over 11 percent, were either some degrees of closure or had
relocated to another URL. Also found were blogshops that appear to have very short
life spans, such as blogshops that close after just one or two series of transactions,
or within a few weeks of being launched.
Figure 3. An example of a blogshop that has posted a closure notice.
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.
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8.
Conclusions and Recommendations
This paper introduces a research interest in blogshops, which have emerged as a
form of online selling in Southeast Asia that is distinct from the more established ecommerce platforms. An initial pilot study of the blogshop phenomenon highlights
certain unique characteristics with regard to ownership, operating structure, and
business behaviour. Blogshops appears to represent a very specific form of
entrepreneurship that arises in the Southeast Asian context in the 21st century.
Looking at the profile of blogshop owners, it is not immediately clear what drives
them to set up such online ventures and how far they could take it as a business.
These aspects must be studied more closely, in order to identify specific forms of
support blogshops would need in order to reach their full potential. Based on the
implications of the findings presented here, it is recommended that further academic
enquiries into the blogshop should consider the following questions. First, the
blogshop presents questions of its status as a valid business entity, and whether it is
a viable type of entrepreneurial venture. Although blogshops engage in commerce
transactions, uncertainties about the motivations behind their creation need to be
addressed, that is, whether blogshops have intentions of serious business making.
In conjunction with this, the long-term sustainability of the blogshop as a viable
format poses questions to be answered. Potential areas to study include its ability to
scale in size and scope of operations, its business models and value propositions, as
well as its relationship with conventional business systems. Finally, the role of social
media in enabling the blogshop its functionalities requires further study. In particular,
the role of social networking sites such as Facebook and the dynamics of leveraging
social connections to build a business base are possible areas to investigate.
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