Recently I have been busy writing my thesis, which aims to clarify two issues. The first issue is, what kinds of VANCL products are likely to be returned more frequently, and why? The other one is what kinds of customers like to return or exchange products, and why they enjoy doing so.
In order to find the answers to these questions, I first needed to collect a large amount of data. It is widely known that product reviews are a valuable source of information for customers choosing products online, so I chose online product reviews as my source of data. I am lucky to have a computer programmer for a husband, so I didn’t have to design new software by myself. I told him what was needed in my data collection, for which he then proceeded to write a crawler program using ruby. This program helped me go through over 300,000 reviews, which I then based my research on.
I found some interesting trends in the process of reviewing product reviews. The results were surprising – I discovered that VANCL sells its own brand of clothes and that their canvas shoes (priced $8 - $20) perform well and sell better than other products. The data showed that people who buy these popular canvas shoes are generally aged between 13 and 19.
Secondly, women are more likely to return or exchange products than men. They seem to be more preoccupied than men, and care more about the size, color, style and quality of the products.
Thirdly, I also found problems with the VANCL product line. For example, some lower priced clothes, of which sales performance is far from ideal, have a higher return rate. This means that VANCL has to pay more for its distribution and warehousing. In fact, such products are not suitable to sell.
I believe that everything is interesting if you continue to ask questions, think deeply, and test frequently.