The global COVID-19 pandemic has greatly changed consumer behavior.

As people are forced to spend more time at home to curb the spread of the virus, their shopping preferences have also shifted.

Lazada Group copresident and regional commercial head Jessica Liu said that toys, kitchen equipment and office supplies were the top-three product categories in Southeast Asian countries during the pandemic.

Liu said, as quoted by antaranews.com, that toys became more popular during the pandemic as people had more time to play with their children.

Meanwhile, the work-from-home policy contributed to the demand for office supplies.

In the past six months, Lazada Indonesia also found that online shopping had become the main option for consumers to get their daily needs while avoiding crowds.

Lazada Indonesia chief customer care officer Ferry Kusnowo predicted the online shopping trend would continue to increase in the future as it was among the ways to accommodate consumers’ desires and needs.

Social media platform Twitter has also recorded changes in Indonesian shopping habits.

According to Twitter data, conversations about shopping had increased up to 60 percent since March this year when compared with the same period last year.

Twitter Indonesia country industry head Dwi Adriansah said last month that conversations about shopping usually appeared in the middle of the year, but this year they had been prominent since March.

Read also: ‘Pay attention’, ‘transform’: Pandemic shifts business landscape, strategy

Moreover, the platform also found that 89 percent of its users shopped online at least once in the first quarter of this year.

With regard to reasons for shopping online, Twitter data showed 56 percent of users said free shipping was among the top reasons to make online purchases, followed by discounts at 55.6 percent and buyer reviews at 54.1 percent.

E-commerce platform Shopee has also seen a shift in shopping behavior.

According to the data released by Shopee, the frequency of shopping had increased threefold during the pandemic. However, the platform found that consumers were more likely to make small value transactions rather than large transactions.

A recent survey by management consulting company Redseer showed that Indonesia’s e-commerce growth trajectory would remain positive with an expected 50 percent year-on-year growth to reach US$35 billion this year from $23 billion in 2019.

“E-commerce platforms are receiving a new cohort of consumers during the pandemic, which enables such growth,” Redseer Southeast Asia partner Roshan Raj Behera told The Jakarta Post in May.

He went on to say that around 30 percent of survey respondents said they were new to online marketplaces, 40 percent of whom said they would keep using e-commerce after the outbreak was over. (jes)

Editor’s note: This article is part of a public campaign by the COVID-19 task force to raise people’s awareness about the pandemic.