There has been a tight competition between e-commerce companies in Asia, especially for the past year. Bukalapak, an Indonesian based e-commerce, became the fourth unicorn company of the country. Meanwhile Tokopedia, also Indonesian e-commerce, raised $.1. billion from SoftBank and Alibaba. On the other hand, Lazada as one of Singapore’s leading e-commerce gained US$4 billion. It is expected by a Google study that the e-commerce sector will gain gross merchandise value up to US$102 billion.
A study was conducted by iPrice group to find out the top e-commerce companies in Malaysia and around the Southeast Asia region. The research was done by analysing the search patterns of customers on Google, including total visits on desktop and mobile web on SimilarWeb on Malaysia.
Lazada in result was the most visited e-commerce platform, having a market share of 46 percent, making it the largest in the competition. In the second place was Shopee with a market share of 23 percent, then 11street at a market share of total visit 13 percent.
Sitting at the second place of course didn’t satisfy Shopee just yet. The company aimed for a higher position by giving more effort into promotions and events which proved to give a tough competition to Lazada. Having backed by Alibaba, the e-commerce managed to grow its total visits by 98 percent on both desktop and mobile web and succesfully reduced Lazada’s lead by 62 percent toward the end of the year.
On the other hand, Lelong, Hermo, and GoShop were the Malaysian companies that also had a large number of visits as well, both on desktop and mobile web. Among the aforementioned e-commerce companies, Lelong was the e-ecommerce company with the most frequent visits with approximately five million visitors throughout 2018, claiming its spot in the fourth number of the most visited e-commerce after Lazada, Shopee, and 11street.
The study that was conducted concluded that The Singles’ Day sale, 12.12 sale, birthday sale, Hari Raya sale and zero-rate GST day gained the most interest, according to the analysed search pattern on the users of Google in Malaysia.
The Single’s Day sale made a bigger interest in 2018 compared to 2017. Due to the success of these sales, Lazada started their Birthday Sales effort that went successful. This sales event in the end proved to garner quite an amount of interest. This success was quickly followed by Shopee.
Although remaining on top of the competition, Lazada was nerly overtaken by Tokopedia on July and August of 2017. The Indonesian e-commerce company achieved a high number of visits, thanks to Ramadhan and Hari Raya sale campaign that was done in May of 2018.
The continuous successful efforts that Tokopedia done to garner more visitors managed to open their opportunity to raise $1.1 billion after a funding round led by SoftBank and Alibaba by the end of last year.
Other e-commerce platforms that remained strong in the Southeast Asia region are Thegioididong and Tiki from Vietnam, with an average of 29 million and 26 million of the total visits on desktop and mobile in 2018.
