What Chinese Female Online Shoppers Need - A Case Study by Applying the Kano Model in E-Commerce

Chinese females always become confused by the “more goods, harder choice” principle when they are shopping online without a definite shopping goal. Taobao wants to provide a high quality shopping guide in its women’s market to solve this problem. Before the Taobao women’s market is established, we should urgently answer the question of which shopping guide functions should be prioritized most highly? In the past, we solved this problem by using the experience of the web-site operator. However, that the website operator plays a decisive role is a very subjective judgment, and the risk cannot be estimated in advance. The Kano model is good at solving the priority problem of functions. Thus, we selected the Kano model for this study. We evaluated 27 shopping guide functions and used them to prioritize the functions of Chinese female consumers’ shopping, which provided an important reference basis for the presentation of a new web page and web page design for the Taobao women’s market. A total of 19 shopping guide functions have been realized in the Taobao women’s market homepage, and each shopping guide function plays a different role. This study fills in the blanks around how the Kano model may be applied in the field of e-commerce.