Vietnamese millennial consumers' behavior towards E-commerce

According to GlobalData (2020), Vietnam was considered as one of the fastest growing e-commerce market in the Southeast Asia region, with the market value of 13.1 billion USD in 2020. One of the key driving forces behind such tremendous growth was suggested to be the millennials – the dominant population group that are exceptionally more tech-savvy with greater buying power than other previous generations. As businesses are developing greater interest in this potential millennial consumer group, it is essential that they gain deeper understanding of their target consumers’ behaviour and attitude towards shopping on local e-commerce sites. Therefore, the objectives were to discover Vietnamese millennials’ behaviour during different stages of the decision-making process and identify the challenges they were facing so as to improve their experiences. A qualitative research was conducted with the use of a semi-structured asynchronous interview as data col-lection method. Convenience sampling was adopted and a sample of 16 Vietnamese millennials were inter-viewed via the Internet. Inductive reasoning was implemented to analyze collected data. In addition, content analysis and constant comparative methods were also adopted during the data analysis stage. The results initially revealed the most influential criteria affecting Vietnamese millennials’ purchase decision as well as the criteria that these consumers consider the least during the alternatives evaluation. The most influential factors include price, reviews, credibility, quality and customer service while delivery time and mi-nor price differentiation belong to the least significant criteria. Secondly, the results suggested different sources from which millennials look for product information and indicated greater trust of them in family and friends’ words as well as non-paid reviews than in online, sponsored reviews. Finally, e-commerce shopping obstacles were acknowledged and improvement suggestions were made by participants. E-commerce businesses that target Vietnamese millennials or researchers in the same field could benefit from the insights of this research