E Commerce
The team was assigned to work on the theme of “media”, which was a pretty broad theme. We spent some time browsing through Kaggle datasets to identify potential, unique datasets that may assist us in narrowing down our range of topics. Several topics surfaced in our discussions, such as social media, press freedom index and the shift in readership from traditional newspapers towards online news. While the gradual shift towards online news was certainly a viable and interesting topic, the data obtained was rather disappointing since it conveyed nothing extraordinary.

Going beyond newspapers and social media, we also decided to stretch our definition of media to include non-tangibles, such as the Press Freedom Index between 2001 to 2015 for 199 countries. The dataset proved to be rather messy, which then required extensive cleaning before we could try our hand at extracting insights. Some of the initial data visualisations included:

Looking at the countries with the least press freedom index, there appears to be a lack of a discernible trend. Furthermore, the data was only available up till 2015, which is arguably outdated by now.
Research on E-Commerce
In view of the limited amount of insights that we can draw from this dataset, we continued searching for other inspirations. We chanced upon a Straits Times article — “Let’s go shopping… on the Internet”, highlighting the rising e-commerce trends in Singapore. Specifically, the article mentioned that Singaporeans spent a monthly average of $155 on online shopping, with Fashion and Electronics being the top two most popular spend categories. With e-commerce being a very relatable topic to all three of us, we were rather excited to venture into this topic.
With the rise of e-commerce platforms offering aggressive discounts and emergence of online shopping powerhouses such as Zalora, Qoo10 and Ezbuy since 2010, we were interested to find out the trend of how much Singaporeans spend online over the years. In line with that, we also went on to research the phenomenon of impulsive shopping in Singapore and found out that 4 in 5 Singaporeans admitted to online impulse buys!
After doing some background research, we then dived in to search for relevant data sets and found data sets from Data.gov.sg on Online Shoppers by Value of Purchase. Using the pivot table function on excel, we got an initial data visualisation:

We segmented the total online purchases in Singapore made according to different value categories ranging from less than $100 all the way to $500 and more. We were surprised by a 2 key insights from the data: firstly, we did not expect that the majority of online purchases were $500 and above before 2014 (just 5 years back!) — we were expecting online purchases to mainly consist of only low-value, cheap items given the relative nascent nature of e-commerce in Singapore, especially 12 years back! Furthermore, we saw an exponential increase in purchases that are $500 or more from 2007 to 2011.
Secondly, we were curious as to why there was a sharp reversal in expensive e-commerce purchasing behaviours from 2013 onwards: it seemed that buying large value items were on the rise just a few years back — but now, big ticket items rank as the least popular category of purchases online. Singaporeans in the past preferred to use e-commerce largely for big-ticket items, while the Singaporean now mainly buys cheap, small-ticket items online. This insight could potentially allow e-commerce platforms to tailor their item mix better, especially those that are still thinking about their success 10 years ago!
We decided to look when exactly popular e-commerce platforms were introduced in Singapore:

Looking at the year of inception for popular e-commerce websites helped shed light on the pattern: we can clearly see that the growth of big-ticket items started slowing down from the introduction of Qoo10 Singapore and RedMart — by the time Zalora, Ezbuy, Lazada and Shopee emerged, big-ticket purchases dipped all the way to the bottom. It seems like the proliferation of e-commerce platforms that encourage convenience and impulse shopping has encouraged the purchases of low-value items — this is supported by our literature review that 4 in 5 Singaporeans are actually impulsive online shoppers!
Noting the increase in overall low-value purchases, we hypothesised that it was correlated with increased penetration rates of smartphones. We then looked into the various launch dates 3 top e-commerce apps, namely Zalora (Apr 2013), Qoo10 (2011) and Ezbuy (2012). These launch dates coincide with the dramatic increase in low-value purchases, suggesting that people tend to shop for cheaper goods online through their smartphones rather than on their desktops. The effect of Qoo10’s app launch in 2011 possibly drove the steep increase in low-value purchases between 2011 to 2012 and subsequently after the launch of Zalora’s app in 2013, driving the trend of the blue line as shown.
To further support this, it would be extremely useful to look at the sales numbers of these platforms in different value categories. Delving further, our group also debated further on additional questions:
1) Was Zalora and Ezbuy the “tipping point” in the Singaporean e-commerce space? Sure, the previous e-commerce platforms slowed down growth in big-ticket items but never failed to cause a large decline in 2013.
2) If yes, why were they the tipping point? What kind of characteristics did they have that were dissimilar to the previous platforms?
3) Will we see this similar trend across all age groups? Andrea argued that we would probably only see this “e-commerce platform effect” in the younger population which has a higher propensity to embrace technology in their spending habits, while Wesley and I felt that the entire Singaporean population are already embracing technology in purchases (high internet penetration rates) — my mother, for example, buys groceries on RedMart.
Conclusion
To be honest, our group found this assignment challenging given our relative unfamiliarity with media. We therefore reverted back to what we thought was relevant in a local context, and relatable to all of us. The Singaporean e-commerce market is definitely evolving over time — and who knows what new purchasing trends might prop up in the future? The essential principle is to continually monitor consumer trends and constantly adapt.