Market Research – Selling Vacuum Cleaners to People with no carpets

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This is a series of articles on the use of social data to solve business problems.

Non-dropshipping eCommerce faces the constant problem of product choice and inventory. With the global market as a supplier, the local business’s dilemma now is importing the right product at a profitable volume and efficiently distributing them without resorting to promotion. 

To illustrate the use of social data in solving this problem, we share a case where the use of social data helps an e-commerce merchant solves a tricky step in this.

An eCommerce merchant wanted to import a robotic vacuum cleaner to Taiwan, but faces the challenge of selling the premium product. In addition, to prevent parallel import, he also has an eye for obtaining the exclusive right to sell the product in Taiwan to recuperate his investment. This process involves demonstrating, with data, a good understanding of the market and a good business process. 

With the rise of Facebook in Taiwan’s everyday life, he turned to QSearch to help achieve this outcome. Our product, QSearch Trend, collects and allows the user to search social media data with the speed and ease of Google Search and the rapid visualization of Big Data. Within minutes, Trend found all the Facebook community pages that discuss vacuum cleaners in their posts and comments. This leads us to two major clusters of fan pages; new parents and pet owners. With our tool WordCloud, we were able to summarize over 1,200 relevant posts. The social data distilled one insight into the Vacuum cleaner users in Taiwan, a country with tiles and no carpet, that the major use of robot cleaners was for allergy control for babies, and to remove excess hair and dander from pets, which trigger allergy and making mopping difficult.

This insight solved the merchant’s problem, not only why Taiwanese use vacuum cleaner, but as well as specific advertising channels and content/market suggestions. This insight gave the merchant a complete plan for distribution and community engagement, as well as clear secondary product ideas, such as sanitation products and vitamin supplements, specifically formulated for allergies. 

With this insight and action plan., the merchant generated a very strong sales record, which he used, along with our market research data, to a supplier proposal to the US robotic company and became the exclusive distributor for Taiwan. 

This is just one simple example of how to use social media data to rapidly test market hypotheses, and create low-cost and high-yield cases to create the proven business thesis needed to improve progress. 

Our technology has since gone on to power social eCommerce website such as Meimaii.com, where our automated influencer-to-product match improves the product selection problem.

To schedule a demonstration of our social data search platform, please use https://go.oncehub.com/RogerDo

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