The impact of mainland customers' e-shopping on Hong Kong's shopping centres

Abstract

Shopping centres in Hong Kong are prosperous and are faced with many competitions from internal or external. The local market is not enough to ensure the market of shopping centres. To expand market and increase revenue, Hong Kong shopping centres should move their eyesight to extraneous customers, especially to Mainland customers. In fact, Mainland shoppers already became one of their major customers. Further more, Mainland market has tremendous potential due to its fast economic develop speed.

E-shopping becomes so popular in Mainland China and has affected many aspect of people’s life styles especially shopping behaviours in Mainland China. It is very likely that e-shopping has affected the shopping behaviours of Mainland shoppers in Hong Kong.

This paper is trying to find the e-shopping’s impact on shopping centres in Hong Kong in terms of Mainland customers. The e-shopping’s impact on physical shopping can be divided into two types: substitution and complementary. Substitution refers to e-shopping replacing physical shopping. Complementarity refers to e-shopping enhancing the physical shopping. Further, many middleman resell the goods they buy in Hong Kong to Mainland customers via e-shopping, which is also complementary.

In order to collect the views and reactions of Mainland shoppers, a quantitative approach would be adopted in collecting and analyzing data. 200 questionnaires would be used to collect the quantitative data. Besides questionnaires, interviews with 35 samples would also be used to dig the deep reasons or thoughts. This paper evaluated both the substitution and complementary effect to draw a conclusion. Besides finding the impact of e-shopping on shopping centres in Hong Kong in terms of Mainland shoppers, this paper would also try to give some recommendations to shopping centres in Hong Kong based on the research conclusion.