Southeast Asia consists of 11 countries, with six of those leading the region economically: Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam. With a combined population of 655 million, a young demographic and online retail sales projected to grow by 44.4% annually, Southeast Asia is an exciting region for ecommerce.
The region has a rich landscape of local ecommerce companies with brands that will be recognized by few people outside SE Asia. The largest players, including Shopee, Lazada and Tokopedia, are online marketplaces selling a diverse range of goods, similar to the Amazon model. They take a large share of Southeast Asia’s total online retail sales, which are forecast to reach $55 billion in 2020.
Despite the similarities of Southeast Asia’s local online marketplaces to Amazon, it is a region where Amazon is a very small force. It launched in Singapore in 2019, but still lags far behind local alternatives. Chinese ecommerce brands do not have a strong ecommerce presence in the region either. There has, however, been billions of dollars of foreign investment in Southeast Asia’s ecommerce industry, from both China and the West.
Shopee is the largest online marketplace in Southeast Asia, with 198 million visits per month. Lazada is similar in size, with 162 million monthly visits. Both companies operate across the region, but their mix of countries is quite different. While 29% of Shopee’s traffic is from Indonesia (by far the largest economy in Southeast Asia), for Lazada the most important countries are Thailand and the Philippines.
The next largest marketplaces, Tokopedia and Bukalapak, are almost exclusively Indonesian, as is the sixth largest website Blibli. All three sell general merchandise and have a combined total of 115 million monthly visits from Southeast Asia.
There are two other single-country marketplaces on the list, Tiki and Sendo, with 22 million and 11.4 million visits per month respectively. Both focus on Vietnam, a smaller economy amongst the six that lead the region, but the fastest growing.
Next there is fashion retailer Zalora, unique on the list as the only marketplace specializing in a single product category, with 7.7 million monthly visits. Fashion is the most popular segment of the ecommerce market in Southeast Asia, with 27% of total sales.
The final marketplace on the list is Qoo10. It sells a wide range of merchandise to countries across the region, with 60% of its traffic from Singapore.
Source: Webretailer.com
