Market research in the context of ecommerce refers to
- online market research for an offline business;
- offline market research for an online business; and
- online market research for an online business.
Market research is the study of groups of people you would like to sell your products/services to. Market research is intended to understand demographics of customers, their needs, their purchase power and the processes of purchase decision making.
Many well-tested techniques (open-ended interviews, surveys, focus group and etc) have been used in market research. The Web provides a new way for conducting surveys cost-effectively.
For ecommerce market research, you are interested in 3 levels of information.
- The trends and the size of overall ecommerce market. This is publicly available on the Internet.
- The trends and size of a particular market segment you're interested in. You'll need to purchase market research reports from market research firms. There're over thousand of companies involved with ecommerce market research.
- The deep understanding of how your targeted market segments perceiving your products and/or services. You'll need either design your market research or contact one or more market research firms for this.
Related Topics
Characteristics of Products/Services
Consumer Market - the growth of B2C Market
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