How Malaysians save money

What are the products that Malaysians like to save money on? Why and how often do they reach for discounts? The Picodi.com analysis team conducted a survey among Malaysian consumers to check what is their attitude towards sales and to find out the most popular ways to save money.

What we save money on

The pandemic forced many Malaysians to save money. More than half of the surveyed people (77%) admitted that over the past year, they bought more products on sale than before.

The product categories most frequently bought on sale include food, clothes and footwear, as well as home appliances. Products bought on sale the least are cars (car parts), child-care products, and pet supplies.

There are products which Malaysians are willing to wait for instead of buying them at the initial price. These include clothes (89%), home appliances (88%), travel & leisure (83%), jewellery (78%) or cars & car parts (76%).

On the other hand, there are some categories of products which Malaysians don’t want or can’t wait for — and they buy them regardless of whether there is a sale or not. These include medicine (52% don’t want to wait for discounts), pet supplies (50%), underwear (38%), food (38%), or child-care products (35%).

Why do Malaysian consumers buy on sales? The most common answer among female and male respondents was that they can save a lot of money thanks to discounts (57% and 54% respectively). The second most popular answer among both men and women (49% each) was that discounts allow them to become familiar with a brand.Almost one third of the men and women surveyed (31% and 26% respectively) believe that the initial prices are too high, so they look for discounted products.

Not everyone likes discounts. 40% of women and 31% of men don’t buy on sales because they think high quality products are worth their standard price. 25% of women and 23% of men ignore sales because they simply don’t worry about the prices. 13% of women believe that discounted products are poor quality or outdated, although only 8% of men share this opinion.

Sometimes Malaysians buy products on sale and never use them. The top 5 categories of products which are thrown away or left unused on shelves are:

1. Clothing
2. Food
3. Home appliances
4. Cosmetics and perfumes
5. Underwear

Malaysian ways to save money

There are many ways to save money, that is why Picodi.com asked Malaysians which methods for finding and using discounts are their favourite.

Among the most popular ones, cashback services placed first. 14% of Malaysians know this method and use it regularly, and as many as 38% use it from time to time. 15% participants admitted that they know what price cashback services are, but they don’t use them, and only 33% don’t know what it is at all.

Price comparison services are used regularly by 14% of those surveyed. 33% use them sometimes, 15% know and don’t use them. 38% claimed they don’t know about the existence of price comparison services.

In the third place were shelves with products reaching their expiry date — 12% use them regularly. 28% use them from time to time, 19% know and don’t use them, while 41% don’t know them at all.

Browser plugins with coupons are not very common (54% of the surveyed consumers don’t know what it is), similar to apps for ordering unsold food surplus (53%), store flyers (46%), and coupon services (46%).

What Malaysians think about ads

What do Malaysians think about advertisements, and do they feel overwhelmed by them? It turns out that more than half (69%) of the respondents think that the number of ads is acceptable. On the contrary, as many as 8% admit that there are too many advertisements. 23% of surveyed Malaysian consumers don’t feel like there are too many ads.

It turns out that the most popular ad that people receive is email — on average, as many as 36 a week. In second place are push notifications in mobile apps (26 times a week).Text messages complete the podium — consumers see them around 21 times a week.
Push notifications in browsers (20 per week) and mailbox leaflets (17 per week) are not as frequent.

If you want to be like other Malaysians and save on clothing and footwear, consider checking out our cashback service. With Picodi you can combine discount codes and cashback to save money in stores such as Under Armour, Tomaz and Zalora.

Methodology

The statistics are from an online survey conducted in July 2021.

Public Use

Would you like to share information about sales and discounts in Malaysia? You are welcome to use all the data and infographics presented in this report for both commercial and non-commercial purposes, provided that you indicate the author of the research (Picodi.com) with a link to this subpage.