Singapore is one of the fastest growing economies in Southeast Asia thanks to the stable economy, high-speed internet and growing number of online shoppers. Source: Shutterstock

Singapore is one of the fastest growing economies in Southeast Asia thanks to the stable economy, high-speed internet and growing number of online shoppers. Source: Shutterstock

How Singapore’s e-commerce platforms performed last year

SINGAPORE is one of the fastest growing economies in Southeast Asia thanks to the stable economy, high-speed internet and a growing number of online shoppers.

Spending’s within Singapore’s e-commerce will rise from USD$5.6 billion to USD$7.4 billion by 2023.

More and more Singaporeans are opting to shop online on their mobile devices which is a contributing factor to the figure. Based on a report from Worldpay, more than 50 percent of online purchases will be done via smartphones.

Whether if it’s pure digital players or brick-and-mortars stores turned online businesses, the e-commerce market in Singapore is already saturated with big and small companies.

To paint a better picture, iPrice rounded up the top 10 performing e-commerce platforms for Singapore in 2018. The data that will be presented is derived from SimilarWeb and is based on the traffic for both desktop and mobile web.

Front-runners of e-commerce sites

Qoo10 takes the number one spot for having the highest average total

In 2018, Qoo10 was recorded to have a total average visit (desktop and mobile web) of 10.2 million traffic, beating Lazada by 2.9 million.

The online marketplace started 2018 with a bang as it clocked the highest visits with 11.9 million visits in January.

According to general manager of Qoo10 Singapore, Sam Too, he believed that Qoo10 had the upper hand as they had first-mover advantage in the market where they had “groomed” the e-commerce industry a decade ago.

To date, Singapore is Qoo10’s second largest contributor to its total Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) after Japan.

Coming in at second place is Lazada which had an average of 7.3 million traffic. Lazada’s traffic was floating between the 5 million to 6 million range from April to October but had a drastic increase and reached 11.2 million within November. The 11.11 sales could have possibly attributed to this sudden growth in traffic.

Taking the third spot is Shopee with an average of 2.08 million traffic. Based on the report, there was a gradual improvement in traffic month after month.

This may be due to Shopee’s efforts of launching the China Marketplace portal in March 2018, where consumers were able to purchase goods directly from Chinse sellers without any shipping and agent fees.

Shopee had the biggest growth when average traffic was compared between Q1 vs Q4

Although Qoo10 had the highest average traffic, Shopee still reigned by having the biggest growth when the average traffic between Q1 vs Q4 of 2018 were compared.

One of the contributing factors to the significant growth of 135 percent is Shopee’s by localizing the online shopping experience for both buyers and sellers in various markets.

Agatha Soh, Shopee’s Head of Regional Marketing said “Shopee is highly customized for each local market and is not a one-size-fits-all platform, which allows us to respond to local users’ needs and preferences more efficiently. This strategy extends to not only our product and marketing strategies, but also to the way we hire our talent.”

On the other hand, the e-commerce platform with the second highest growth is Reebonz with 24.6 percent while Zalora follows close behind with 23.3 percent.

Uptrend growth in Southeast Asia’s top e-commerce platforms

We calculated the percentage of growth of the total visits by the company between January and November 2018 and saw that the 10 top e-commerce platforms in Southeast Asia grew its traffic by 53 percent on average.

This positive uptrend is mirrored by Google’s report stating that the online retail sector is moving quicker than expected.

Commanding the biggest market share of online traffic of the year are Lazada at 27 percent, Tokopedia at 17 percent, Shopee at 15 percent and Bukalapak at 12 percent.

Lazada maintains its market-leading position despite facing stiff competition from Tokopedia and Shopee throughout the year.

By the end of 2018, we see Shopee closing into Lazada to become its closest competitor. Shopee grew its traffic to overtake Tokopedia and reduced Lazada’s preeminent position by 66 percent in its total visits.

From the results, we can observe that Lazada and Shopee are still the top players within the regional level. Additionally, both of the e-commerce companies are headquartered in Singapore.

The Singapore government has taken efforts for e-commerce to thrive in the country making it the ideal country for their center of operations.

One example is the collaboration between the Info-communications Media Development Authority (IMDA) and the Info-communications Media Development Authority (IMDA) has collaborated with the Economic Development Board (EDB) to develop and adopt common IT standards.

This, in turn, will effortlessly improve B2B documents exchange within various companies in the electronic cluster.

 

Contributed by iPrice.