Singapore Online Shopping Statistics

From: http://www.techinasia.com/the-stats-and-facts-of-online-shopping-in-singapore/

The Stats and Facts of Online Shopping in Singapore

March 30, 2011 by Willis Wee, in Asia, Business

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The size of the Singapore online shopping market reached S$1.1 billion in 2010 and is forecasted to hit S$4.4 billion in 2015, according to PayPal’s research.

Even though 1.2 million Singaporean online shoppers (above the age of 18 years old) had an average spend per head of S$1,492 over the past year, two-thirds of the online shopping spend (S$730 million) came from the middle income and above (personal earnings of S$4,001 and above) groups in Singapore.

Contrary to popular belief that Singaporeans shop online mostly on overseas websites, a significant portion of online retail purchases are domestic as online shoppers spend nearly 40% (approximately S$420 million) on local websites.

Even when Singaporean online shoppers do buy from overseas websites, they cite “unavailability” (58%) and “greater choice” (48%) as more important reasons than “less expensive” (44%), “better discounts” (42%) or “strong Singapore dollar” (35%). Local merchants can benefit from the growth in domestic online spending as well as offer a wider choice and selection of goods (instead of competing on price) to get a larger slice of the online shopping market.

Elias Ghanem, PayPal’s General Manager for South East Asia and India, said, “With the online shopping market growing so quickly and breaking through the billion dollar mark, Singaporeans are clearly finding great value and a wide range of products and services on the Web, be it on domestic or overseas websites. The study results prove to local merchants that they should embrace a multi-channel approach for both in-store and online retail experience, with mobile as an emerging platform, in order to be wherever their customers are.”

The study was conducted from January to February 2011 and polled 407 Singapore online shoppers aged 18 and above from Nielsen’s panel for their online and mobile shopping transactions in the past 12 months. Besides providing an overview of the growing online shopping market, the study also revealed insights into the attitudes and behaviors of Singaporeans when buying online and on mobile devices.

Below are some of the key findings for domestic and cross-border online shopping in Singapore:

1. More than just airline and hotel bookings: While the travel category is tops, it only accounted for S$307 million or 28% of the online shopping market in Singapore. Other key online shopping categories include: Fashion/Beauty (S$146 million, 13% share), Entertainment/Lifestyle (S$143 million, 13% share), IT/Electronics (S$117 million, 11% share), General Insurance (S$83 million, 8% share), and Gifts/Collectibles (S$75 million, 7% share).

2. Different items purchased between domestic and overseas websites:Movies/events tickets (S$36 million) and general insurance (S$36 million) are top categories for domestic online shopping, while books (S$41 million) and movies/music/video games (S$24 million) are top categories for cross-border online shopping. In addition, online shoppers buy nearly double the amount for clothing (S$84 million) and travel packages (S$38 million) on overseas websites compared to domestic sites.

3. Security and online spending: Enhancing security can boost online spending, especially for high income group (With personal earnings of S$6,001 and above). Slightly more than 4 out of 10 say that current credit/debit card security measures for online transactions are inadequate and half believe they are taking a risk every time they transact online with their credit/debit cards. Yet, increasing safety measures would convince nearly 6 out of 10 to spend more online. In fact, the high income group was the most concerned about security measures (57%), but are the most willing to increase their online shopping if safety is improved (65%).

In addition, these were the key findings for m-commerce and mobile shopping:

1. Mobile shopping still in its infancy stage: Over 364,000 Singaporean online shoppers spent S$43 million on their mobile devices last year, approximately 4% of the online shopping market. Mobile shoppers bought low-priced items like movie tickets, fashion items and mobile apps, leading to an average spend per head of S$119 over the past year.

2. Significant growth potential for mobile shopping: 4 out of 10 online shoppers in Singapore are willing to make a purchase on their mobile phones. More importantly, nearly 6 out of 10 of the high income group would be interested to do so, and they accounted for more than half of the mobile spend last year. In addition to more Singaporean online shoppers interested in buying on their mobile devices, they would like to buy higher-priced items like IT/electronics, general insurance and collectibles, boosting the potential size of the mobile shopping market.

3. Factors for mass adoptions: Convenient, safe, and fast mobile shopping experience will be critical for mass adoption. The top 3 barriers to mobile shopping are small screen size (55%), security concerns (52%) and slow mobile Internet connection (42%).

Based on the online and mobile shopping study results, Elias concluded, “The strong call-to-action for local merchants is to quickly adopt a multi-channel retail strategy, provide greater choice in their online product offerings and offer more secure online payment options. In order to sell to mobile shoppers, they should choose a safer mobile payment method that can be completed in as few clicks as possible.”

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Tags: e-commerce, M-commerce, Singapore

About Willis Wee

Founder of Tech in Asia who is also an entrepreneur since 2005. Contact him at willis[at]techinasia[dot]com

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Singapore Online Stats and Tech Start-ups

From: http://www.techinasia.com/online-statistics-singapore/

Online Statistics, Behavior and Tech Start-ups in Singapore

May 19, 2011 by Willis Wee, in Startups, Web

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If you’re a digital marketer overseeing theSingapore market or a business owner looking to understand this island country better, this blog post is for you.

We received a white paper from Incitez, a digital media consultancy firm, that contains useful information about Singapore’s online community. Here’s a quick brief before you plunge into the powerpoint deck and other resources below:

Internet statistics: Singapore has 2.9 million online population.

Online search: Google is the leading search engine with 77% market share.

Facebook and Twitter: 82% of Singapore online users are on social networks with 2.5 million on Facebook and 13.5% who visited Twitter in January this year.

Online Video: An average Singapore online user spends about 10.7 hours each month watching online videos. Total unique video viewers is reported at 2.3 million, which is pretty close to Singapore’s total online population at 2.9 million.

Blogs: Blogs reach in Singapore hit 55% in 2010.

Mobile: There is a total of 7.3 million mobile subscribers. This figure is 2 million above our total population. Apparently, there are quite a handful Singaporeans who are holding more than one phone while 3G users in Singapore hit a whopping 4.8 million in 2011. iPhone rules in Singapore, accounting for 72% of mobile usage.

Travel: About 1 out of every 2 Singapore Internet users does online research and book their ticket on the Internet for travel. This figure is highest in Southeast Asia. Tiger Airways is Singapore’s top airline website.

Online retail: ‘eBay’ is the top retail-related search term in Singapore, but Apple.com is the favorite online retail website, commanding 575 monthly unique visitors. Second and third favorites shopping destination for Singaporeans are Amazon sites and Alibaba.com, respectively.

Online banking: Visits to online banking site hit 889,000 per month in January this year. A 100,000 increased from last year’s January statistics. Singapore has the highest online banking reach in Southeast Asia at 30.9%.

If this isn’t complete enough, more could be found on a wiki-site build by students at Singapore Management University. It also contains valuable information about Singapore’s online community. This online user behavior infographic is particularly easy-to-read and helpful for others to understand online users behavior in Singapore.

Also, check out Singapore’s mobile usage activity.

Tech Start-ups in Singapore

The above statistics do look great considering Singapore only has a population size of 5 million. Nonetheless, its small population still posed as a problem for local start-ups to scale.

“Singapore is a small island with surprisingly a lot of start-ups in digital business. And, the government has created excellent environment for them,” said Rocky Fu, CEO of Incitez.

“Unfortunately, digital business is limited by the country’s small space; to continue the growth, start-ups need to explore opportunities beyond Singapore after seeing success locally,” he added.

Our interview with Jeffrey Paine, partner at Founders Institute also highlighted the same problem. When asked about the greatest obstacles faced by entrepreneurs in Singapore, Paine said that “local [Singapore] and regional markets are small and hard to scale evenly.”

Despite small in population size, Singapore, in my opinion, remains to be one of the best countries in Asia to develop a technology idea. Find out why.

Ecommerce Evolution in Malaysia

From: http://www.ecomzen.com/p/malaysia-state-of-e-commerce.html

E-COMMERCE EVOLUTION IN MALAYSIA

Malaysia does have its own share of online retailers and e-commerce companies, though on a much smaller scale than the United States or Japan. Some have been around since the Internet hit our shores in the nineties. One of the famous first movers here is Blooming - the online florist, and they are still going strong today.

Another prime example surviving the dot-com bubble burst is Malaysia’s very own online auction site - Lelong. It is still arguably more popular than eBay Malaysia here despite its cluttered look and feel. Interestingly, Lelong has recently attempted an Amazon-ish online shopping site at SuperBuy.

One of the most important e-commerce milestones has to be the online ticketing site by Air Asia, a low cost airline based in Malaysia. Starting operation not long after the September 11 attack, the online site is the primary channel to purchase budget airline tickets (holiday packages are available too). A lot of people here were since braving themselves by entering the credit card numbers online in order to get bargain tickets. I would say that it was the starting point of e-commerce mass adoption here.

In recent years, online buy-sell activities are frequented at major auction and forum sites, and to a certain extent, popular foreign stores. At the same time, thousands of online stores are also mushrooming locally, with fashion and apparel being the most popular segment. Quite a number of them are blogshops too, which I guess is a unique trend happening only in Malaysia and Singapore.

Perhaps partly due to the need of those blogshops to sell more professionally, we have seen a few e-commerce SaaS providers emerging last year in 2009. For example, Neowave (who has been supplying shopping cart software for years) has since offered its e-commerce SaaS branded webShaper at affordable prices to online retailers.

Not to be missed, year 2009 also witnessed the big move by a local e-commerce company - MOL as mentioned earlier. Another piece of exciting news came from PayPal in the same year, who announced that they are now accepting transaction in local currency as well as withdrawals to local banks.

MOL is back in the headlines again in 2010 thanks to their partnership with Facebook, well they have Friendster to thank too! The same year also witnessed the group-buying sites are gaining attention here by offering heavily discounted retail vouchers. Some of the local Groupon-clones are MyDeal (from Singapore), GroupsMore and Everyday Coupons.

E-COMMERCE CHALLENGES IN MALAYSIA

Yes, no doubt we have experienced exciting developments in the local e-commerce scene, but many will not disagree that we are still far from the maturity level. The general public here simply doesn’t have the online shopping habit yet. It will take a mixture of cheaper, special, choices or loyalty offerings to encourage the habit of transacting online.

To a certain extent, I would say that we are lacking an e-commerce giant, something like Amazon or Rakuten. That could well kick start local e-commerce mass adoption, similar to what Air Asia has done to the online ticketing space. Of course, like any other markets, people here are generally concerned about security. The presence of the big boys (be it foreign or local) can afford pulling in the financial resources to help educate the local public. On the other hand, online retailers should also do their part in gaining trust from their customers.

As for smaller or medium sized online retailers, the biggest challenge would be attracting traffic to their online store without significant marketing funds. Unless you are selling something niche, it is quite difficult to pull traffic organically from the search engines which index product pages from all over the world. Besides huge e-commerce marketplaces, an obvious piece of the puzzle missing here is the price comparison engine, which could be a great channel for products to get found.

WHAT LIES AHEAD?

Coming back to big boys, Rakuten is strongly rumored to be having talks with certain local players, as Malaysia could well be part of their international expansion plan. There were also rumors of a substantial foreign investment on an established local e-commerce company.

Rumors aside, there are already some initiatives or ongoing developments by local companies to venture into (or expand their) e-commerce services. Suddenly, it seems that many want to be part of the e-commerce game plan. Online retailers are also growing by day, from individual sellers to existing brick & mortars. We need to keep an eye on MOL too, on their development with Facebook, Friendster and so on - perhaps social shopping and physical goods infrastructure are on the cards?

So, who will be the Amazon of Malaysia? Be it Lelong, Air Asia, MOL, Rakuten, Acmamall, someone or no one, e-commerce’s future here can only be brighter in coming years!

Online shopping statistics Malaysia 2010-2011

This is an older article:

From: http://marketing-interactive.com/news/25946

 

PayPal: Online Shopping Hits 1.8 Billion

By: Staff Writer, Malaysia

Published: Apr 21, 2011

PAYPAL   RESEARCH   MOBILE   NIELSEN 

Malaysia - The size of the Malaysian online shopping market reached RM1.8 billion in 2010 according to PayPal's "Online and Mobile Shopping Insights" study.

PayPal estimates the market to grow to RM5 billion in 2014 and the study, conducted by The Nielsen Company, supported the country's reputation for being sophisticated and affluent online shoppers.

The survey results also showed that there were 1.1 million Malaysian online shoppers last year (above the age of 18) with an average spend per head of RM2,461, yet 70% of the total online shopping spend came from the middle income and above groups.

"With the online shopping market growing so quickly and nearly reaching the two billion Ringgit mark, Malaysians are finding great value in buying products and services via the Web as part of their daily lives," said Elias Ghanem (pictured), PayPal's managing director and general manager for Southeast Asia and India.

"In addition, Malaysians prefer to shop on local websites and are looking online for a wider range of higher-quality goods, not just the lowest price. So domestic retailers have a chance to compete with overseas websites and should set up their online stores now to capture a slice of the RM1.8 billion online shopping market," said Ghanem.

Malaysians spent the majority of their online retail purchases worth RM825 million on local websites (45%), compared to RM627 million on overseas websites (35%), and the remaining RM371 million (20%) on websites with unknown countries of origin.

Even when Malaysian online shoppers buy from overseas websites, they cite "unavailability" (65%), "greater choice" (55%) and "higher quality" (36%) as more important reasons than "less expensive" (35%), "better discounts" (32%) and "strong Malaysian Ringgit" (23%).

According to the e-commerce company, local merchants can be the biggest winners from the growth of the Malaysian online shopping market by providing a variety of high-quality goods on their online stores.

Besides providing the market size of the vibrant online shopping market, the study revealed insights into the attitudes and behaviours of Malaysians when buying online and on mobile devices.

Some key findings from the study include:

Online shopping is more than just airline and hotel bookings. A wide range of categories shows that online shopping is becoming more mainstream and a bigger part of Malaysians' daily lives:

• Travel = RM435 million (24%)
• Bill payments = RM329 million (18%)
• Entertainment and lifestyle = RM255 million (14%)
• IT and electronics = RM218 million (12%)
• General insurance = RM205 million (11%)
• Fashion and beauty = RM181 million (10%)
• Gifts and collectibles = RM68 million (4%)

Malaysians buy different items between domestic and cross-border online shopping.

• Malaysians purchased nearly 2.5 times as much airline tickets from local websites (RM173 million) compared to overseas websites (RM72 million).
• Financial products/services (RM78 million) and health/beauty products (RM29 million) are mainly purchased on local websites.
• Online purchases for clothings/shoes/accessories are slightly more on local websites (RM48 million) compared to overseas websites (RM41 million).
• Nearly twice as much spent online for books on overseas websites (RM63 million) compared to local websites (RM36 million).
• Nearly twice as much is spent online for movie/music/game downloads on overseas websites (RM51 million) compared to local websites (RM27 million).
• Malaysians' favourite countries for overseas online shopping were the US, Singapore, UK, China and Hong Kong.

Enhancing security can boost online spending.

• Four out of 10 Malaysian online shoppers said that current credit/debit card online security measures are inadequate.
• Nearly six out of 10 believe they are taking a risk every time they transact online with their credit/debit cards.
• However, increasing safety measures would convince nearly seven out of 10 to spend more online.
• The middle income group (personal earnings of RM4,001 to RM8,000), which accounts for the largest share of the online shopping market (42%), is the most willing to increase their online shopping if safety is improved (72%).

In the mobile shopping space, the study found that m-commerce is in its early stages, but has strong growth potential with over 254,000 online shoppers spending RM100 million via their mobile devices in 2010, approximately 6% of the online shopping market value

The top activity for mobile shoppers was paying bills on the go (22%), followed by buying low-priced items such as movie tickets (21%), books (15%) and movie/music/game downloads (14%) which led to an average mobile spend per head of RM388 in the past year.

Four out of 10 online shoppers are willing to make a purchase on their mobile phones with the top three barriers to mobile shopping being small screen size (48%), slow mobile Internet connection (48%) and security concerns (37%).

Based on the online and mobile shopping study results, Ghanem said the strong call-to-action for local merchants is to quickly adopt a multi-channel retail strategy.

"Provide greater product choice and higher quality items in the online store, and offer more secure online payment options. In order to sell to mobile shoppers, they should choose a safer mobile payment method that can be completed in as few clicks as possible," he added.

Malaysia's E-Commerce Statistics

From: http://www.malaysiacrunch.com/2012/03/malaysias-e-commerce-statistics-updated.html

 

Malaysia's E-Commerce Statistics (Updated)

 
The last time I wrote about e-commerce statistics in Malaysia was 2-3 years back, which you can read it here. It's time to get some updated figures, thanks to PayPal's "Online and Mobile Shopping Insights" study.

Malaysia's online shopping market size was RM 1.8 billion in 2010, estimated to be RM 5 billion in 2014. It's safe to predict that our e-commerce market size is around RM 2-3 billion for this year.

 

70% of the total online shopping spend came from the middle income and above groups (RM 4,000 and above).

Out of the RM 1.8 billion, RM 825 million or more was spent on local websites, local merchants.

 

As expected, travel (airline tickets etc.) still leads in terms of products / services bought online. This time around, bill payment is finally included at second place. 



Some interesting facts whether shopping is done on local or overseas websites:

- Malaysians purchased nearly 2.5 times as much airline tickets from local websites (RM 173 million) compared to overseas websites (RM 72 million).

- Financial products / services (RM 78 million) and health / beauty products (RM 29 million) are mainly purchased on local websites.

- Online purchases for clothings / shoes / accessories are slightly more on local websites (RM 48 million) compared to overseas websites (RM 41 million).

- Nearly twice as much spent online for books on overseas websites (RM 63 million) compared to local websites (RM 36 million).

- Nearly twice as much is spent online for movie / music / game downloads on overseas websites (RM 51 million) compared to local websites (RM 27 million).

- Malaysians' favourite countries for overseas online shopping were the US, Singapore, UK, China and Hong Kong.

Mobile Commerce 

While m-commerce still in its early stage,  RM 100 million (approximately 6% of the online shopping market value) is being spent via mobile devices, in 2010.

As you can see from the chart below, buying physical products via mobile devices hasn't hit mainstream yet. 

 

Statistics sourced from PayPal's "Online and Mobile Shopping Insights" study.

Social Commerce- the Next Wave

From: http://www.business2community.com/social-business/the-next-wave-social-commerce-0285184

The Next Wave: Social Commerce

By Samuel Junghenn, Published September 20, 2012

 

Lately reporters, clients and friends have asked me what I think the future will hold for the Internet.  They all wanted to know what I thought so they could start positioning their business for future growth and capitalize on the opportunities that it presents.
In my opinion there are two massive growth opportunities that exist in the marketing right now, one is mobile websites and the other is social commerce.  In this post I’m focusing on social commerce.
Social Commerce is the term used to describe the process of buying and selling goods via social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.  When Facebook initially listed publicly one of the major reasons why it listed at such a high price was investors were gambling on social commerce.
They saw that Facebook had a captive audience and was the most visited website in the world, they were hoping that Facebook would find a way of successfully introducing e-commerce into the platform and start profiting this way.  This speculation by investors was partially backed by a code leak found by a few developers.
You see, Facebook has an open API and part of the API showed code, which indicated that Facebook would be introducing something, called a “want” button.  This was different to the “like” button and was linked to another function within Facebook called “products”.
Now these functions are not yet publicly available but they were taken as strong indications that Facebook was trying to tackle the larger problem of social commerce.  While there share price has fallen considerably lately, if they can solve the social commerce problem in just months they could quickly recover the price.
Very simply put, investors are hoping that Facebook finds a way they can become the “Amazon” of the social world.  In my personal opinion if they could do this then they would very quickly overtake Amazon based of their large user base.
In the mean time, while they find a way to do this, us as Internet Marketers and business owners need to put our energies and focus into turning our Facebook Page presence’s into social commerce.
We need to monetize our fans by selling to them within the platform using online stores like Payvment and Big Cartel.  These stores allow you to set up a Facebook shop simply and without coding required.
It’s time to embrace Social Media and start engaging in Social Commerce.

Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-business/the-next-wave-social-commerce-0285184#0RREWyyDXDaQ4zSW.99