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As a region that’s mobile-first – and sometimes mobile-only – Southeast Asia is leading the way towards mobile commerce (mCommerce). In 2019, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines were among the top five countries globally by number of mCommerce users. The COVID-19 pandemic has done little to slow that trend, with 90% of Southeast Asia’s internet users having come online via their mobile phones.
Being late adopters of the internet, many households in Southeast Asia skipped over desktop computers and went straight to smartphones. The bulk of web searches today are done on mobile, while consumer spending on mCommerce has chipped away at the desktop. The visuals below give a sense of the growth potential for mCommerce in Southeast Asia, and offer clues as to how brands should build and optimise customer journeys for mobile.
Although mobile users spent 60% to 70% less time on eCommerce platforms during online shopping events compared to desktop users, they are still the single largest source of shopping traffic in the region at 90%.
A ranking of the top shopping apps for mobile users in 2020 puts Shopee at the top, followed by Lazada and direct-to-consumer fashion retailer Shein. The situation differs in Indonesia and Thailand, where locally-owned marketplaces are dominant. Tokopedia Bebas Ongkir, operated by the Indonesian shopping app Tokopedia, offers free shipping for select merchants. Indomaret Poinku is a membership program which allows customers to collect and exchange points through the network’s own digital payment platform i.saku. In Thailand, the Central Group owns an eponymous app that rewards users with discounts.
There are two ways for marketers to ride the mCommerce wave in 2021:
By leveraging on data, brands can offer a higher level of personalisation in the customer journey. But to a achieve the gold standard in personalisation of 1:1, marketers will need to work with tools such as a data management platform. One example is ADA’s XACT, which combines online and offline data from 375 million consumers in South and Southeast Asia to provide marketers with data enrichment. The next step is to generate actionable insights out of data. ADA’s Consumer Insights Explorer (CIE), built on XACT, uses machine learning to build unique audience segments and customer personas for targeting.
With mobile taking the lead in eCommerce, marketers will need to continuously design and build around a smartphone-first world. Having the right MarTech tools is key – but marketers should avoid creating a “franken-stack” of tools that haphazardly link back into a stack. Beyond acquiring new technology, brands should focus on what they already have to increase the return on investment. To tie it all together, a strategy that combines data-driven marketing, MarTech and eCommerce will be essential.