Panic buying, at-home needs, livestream shopping, and e-commerce accelerated the shopping landscape in Southeast Asia (SEA) during COVID-19. Thanks to these shopping trends, Shopback –which has recently expanded to South Korea– is able to continue running its annual mega shopping festival ShopFest from September to December this year. Yes, even amidst the pandemic.

“Many consumers look forward to the year-end shopping season as that is when brands compete to run attractive sales and promotions. However, it can be overwhelming for the consumer as more and more online retailers participate each year,” says Henry Chan, Co-Founder and CEO of ShopBack.

So, ShopBack created a unified platform to seamlessly connect these brands and consumers –at the same time help consumers cut through the noise and better navigate through the various sale events and deals. This is how ShopFest was born, as the first stop for a consumer’s online shopping journey.

The four-month-long ShopFest includes key dates such as 9.9, 11.11, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. In order to enhance their value offering for the 20 million user base, ShopBack has added new in-app features targeted at growing conservative shoppers that are seeking out more ways to maximise their savings. These new features will help consumers make better purchasing decisions and will roll out across ShopBack’s nine markets at different times over the next year.

Rolling out new features at a time when startups are hibernating or even shutting down, is almost like music to one’s ears. Amidst global uncertainty, how could ShopBack be so sure their new features will be well received by their 20 million strong user base spread across nine countries in SEA?

In an effort to dig deeper into how ShopBack measures customer value and used customer feedback metrics to shape its product development journey, e27 speaks to Candice Ong, Chief Commercial Officer, and Justin Lee, Chief Product Officer, at ShopBack.

What we will learn in this article:

1. The essential effect: Customer behaviour during a crisis
2. Consumers show the way: Utilising customer feedback in the product development process
3. But the process goes on: Preventing analysis paralysis

The essential effect

In the earlier stages of the pandemic, there was a natural rise in the sales of essentials and groceries across the region via e-commerce. This was unsurprising as consumers were required to stay at home to effectively manage the rapid spread of COVID-19, and therefore turned to online shopping to purchase their daily necessities.

But something interesting to note is that although consumers generally reined in their spending, the idea of what a ‘need’ is shifted during this period, says Ong.

“As consumers spent more time at home, we found that they became more willing to spend on home appliances, fitness equipment, and apparel, entertainment and gaming equipment, and food delivery.”

“These were once considered ‘peripheral’ luxuries but as people were forced to stay at home, they seem to have transitioned to be part of a ‘new normal’ of spending, where spending on these categories replaced expenditure on travel and outdoor entertainment,” adds Ong.

For instance, in Singapore alone, ShopBack saw a four-time surge in orders for product categories such as fitness and electronics, while the internet services category (e.g. VPN, anti-virus) increased by around 70 times from Q1-Q2.

The trend of consumers seeking greater value and becoming more conservative in their spending only aggravated during the pandemic as cash flow became a challenge for all societies. According to a recent report by Facebook and Bain & Company, there has been a shift to value-for-money purchasing across Southeast Asia as conservatism sets in. A survey found that on average, 57 per cent of respondents cited “value” among their top purchasing considerations.

Also Read: Building great customer experience when it matters the most

“When COVID-19 hit, we quickly ramped up on building and rolling out new features to further simplify the shopping experience and help our users make better purchasing decisions. One such feature was a price comparison feature, where users can compare prices of similar items across different online stores,” says Ong.

Others included ‘Voucher’ where users can enjoy attractive discounts and cashback when they purchase vouchers from a wide variety of ShopBack’s merchant partners, both online and offline. This also helped merchants lock in sales, while users find value in the cashback from these vouchers and store credits.

And then there is ‘Challenge’ where users can complete specific tasks or challenges set by ShopBack and receive bonus cashback and other attractive rewards.

Consumers show the way

Ong shares that while these innovative value-added features were released in response to the changing shopping behaviours during COVID-19, they were based on their continued data-centric approach to understanding customer behaviour.

Users are big contributors to the ideation stage of the features that Shopback builds. Be it in-person or virtual interactions the tech and product teams take note of the candid suggestions and enhancements consumers wish to see.

“Listening to your customers is a deceivingly simple idea, yet it is often forgotten. No matter how large a business grows, we need to remember that actual human beings are behind every click, impression, and sale,“ says Ong.

In a pre-COVID-19 world, they collected user feedback through focus groups and invited users down to test the product, and they continued to do so during the pandemic via more calls and virtual meetings with users.

“Getting early anecdotes from our customers has been instrumental in shaping the roadmaps of each of our product lines,” says Lee.

Whilst all of Shopback’s products are built with user feedback in mind, the tech and product teams decide the best time to launch these features. “To do this, we need to take into consideration supply-side dynamics and the competitive landscape,” he elaborates.

When the product first goes live, it often starts as a customised version of a design sprint, he adds. And once the feature starts taking shape, it goes into the development pipeline where the team turns their attention to key areas such as operations, sales, and marketing.

The development team does keep track of a development schedule and will also organise demos and internal usability testing prior to the official launch.

The product development cycle largely depends on the size and complexity of the features. For bigger features such as the new Vouchers, the teams involved going beyond just the standard two-pizza development scrum teams.

Vouchers had to be tightly integrated with other parts of their existing product so multiple development teams were combined into a ‘taskforce’ to accomplish the mission, says Lee. And hence it took the team six weeks, including lots of late nights and weekends –from ideation to shipping the feature to production, he continues.

Also Read: A multi-disciplinary approach to product development requires collaboration

Lee stresses the power of OKRs at ShopBack to guide product development and said they were a great way to merge top-down priorities with bottom-up problem statements.

“This (OKR) method has allowed us to stay aligned across all levels on what the focus areas are –be it new features or product improvements, how we define success, and when we aim for changes to take effect,” he says.

But the process goes on …

But it just doesn’t end there. Dishing out changes to your consumer base in such fragile times is full of risks. Which is why ShopBack teams process user feedback equally minutely.

One has to be careful with data. Metrics, if identified correctly, can yield great insights but if overdone, it can lead to the common ‘analysis paralysis’ problem.

So, in addition to dashboards that help track customer responses to the newly launched features, ShopBack also collected valuable insights directly from users. “COVID-19 has not deterred our efforts in this area, our product managers and designers work hard to ring up users who are early adopters of our features to solicit feedback,” says Lee.

For newly launched features, it also helps in quickly gauging user response and re-define ways if it becomes clear that the team is heading in the wrong direction. The user research teams also disseminated email surveys to gather feedback.

Ong says, “We also created ShopBack community groups in several local markets, including Singapore so that local teams can directly engage with customers and collect their feedback. User feedback is extremely important to us, as it helps us to understand their pain points and identify the problems to solve.”

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