Pa-mine po : Determining the communication strategies used by online sellers in promoting their products online during the pandemic
Date
2023
Authors
Harold Jay S. Garabillo
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Abstract
Social media in business is rapidly becoming a new trend, particularly among small business owners. For the reason that the Internet is viewed as the future frontier for conducting business, many merchants are transitioning from a typical physical store to an online shop or E-commerce. According to Hudson (2010), the term E-commerce is defined as "the use of an electronic platform to conduct business transactions" that is also known as "Virtual Market Place". This type of selling allows business owners to reach a wider range of customers while minimizing some issues such as schedule, convenience, availability and location concerns in business transactions.
Consequently, no business would afford to ignore the internet's massive "Online Market". E-commerce was inevitable, and " virtual Markets" have largely surpassed traditional physical markets. Since it redefined the terms " market", e-commerce has had a huge impact on business nowadays. E-Commerce has enabled vendors to reach out to to the worldwide market and consumers, altering business operations and communication marketing is done.
The purpose of this paper is to figure out the communication strategies used by online sellers in promoting their products online through the use of different social media sites during the pandemic.
The results shows that the respondents (Online Sellers) of this research were doing a good job on their online business. It revealed that, while majority of them were experiencing difficulties with their product promotion online, there was still a large number who have strategies in place to avoid or deal with it. For instance, all of the respondents were female and 63% of them were at the age of between 19-25 years old. They had different products they sell online however, most of them are thrift clothes or "ukay-ukay". Moreover, although 57% of the respondents are doing online selling for 1-5 years, 43% of them are still having a low profit ranging from 1,000 to 3,000 pesos per month. On the other hand, since product promotion is one of the most important aspects of doing online business, the respondents did not fail to provide one. However, they used various strategies for their particular online product promotion. This paper discovers that the respondents' product promotion was mostly made up of images with captions written in Tagalog for the customer's overall understanding and convenience.
The respondents were indeed experiencing difficulties with regard to their product promotion online. Thus, most of them were able to deal with it by utilizing strategies of their own. The strategies they utilized to deal with the difficulties regarding their product promotion are pretty basic and mostly business centered approaches. However, although they already have their own strategies, it can be still developed to create a more strategic way how to persuade their customers to buy their products through their product promotion online.
Finally, in doing business, difficulties are part of the process so as the respondents of this study were experiencing. However, the respondents frequently use business-focused strategies when conducting online business. Having said that, despite the fact that the respondents encountered a variety of issues with the promotion of their products online, they still managed to find a solution by focusing their attention to their business. Being business-oriented meant that respondents did not allow barriers such as language barriers, physical noise barriers, psychological barriers, technological barriers, and so on to impede their online product promotion.
The respondents must also utilize different social media sites as business platforms. Although Facebook is easier to use as a platform, it doesn't cater to many audiences especially as the respondents were using their personal accounts. Personal Facebook accounts are only accesible to friends, therefore access for some people is restricted unless thaey specifically intend to visit the account.