3 Vietnamese platforms among most visited ecommerce sites in SE Asia

2018 was another highly successful year for Vietnamese ecommerce companies. While Shopee and Lazada broke one record after another during their big sale campaigns, local competitors Tiki and Sendo received huge investments to improve their fighting chances.

Furthermore, the progress of these Vietnamese companies were significant enough to put them among the most successful ecommerce platforms in Southeast Asia in 2018, according to new findings from iPrice research.

Note: All data on the total visits on desktop and mobile cited in this study was taken from global traffic figures from the respective regional sites. The insights were based on SimilarWeb data. SimilarWeb traffic figures are estimates.

Second-biggest market in Southeast Asia

The research was conducted in six countries in the region: Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. It ranked the 10 most successful ecommerce platforms in 2018 based on average monthly web traffic.

The final result shows that among the top 10, five operate in Vietnam. They are Lazada, Shopee, Tiki, Thegioididong, and Sendo.

While Lazada and Shopee are international corporations operating in multiple markets (which makes their positions in the list less of a surprise), the inclusion of the remaining three is concrete proof of ecommerce’s potential and size in Vietnam.

In particular, even though Sendo, Tiki, and Thegioididong are only available for consumers within Vietnam, their traffic numbers are still impressive enough to put them within the regional top 10 – surpassing even China’s JD, which now operates in Thailand and Indonesia.

The most remarkable, however, is Thegioididong. The company is the only merchant in the top 10 to focus on just one product category: electronic devices. Despite a niche offering, it still managed to gain an average of 29 million visits per month.

These numbers show that online shopping is now greatly popular among Vietnamese consumers. It also hints that the Vietnamese market will keep increasing in the near future.

This conclusion is in line with recent predictions made by Google and Temasek. According to their report, the Vietnamese ecommerce market will grow by 43% in 2025 – the highest in the region.

Many exciting developments

With such a big potential, it comes as a no surprise that in 2018 Vietnamese ecommerce companies were able to acquire significant amount of foreign funding.

Right at the beginning of the year, Tiki received investment from JD in a series C round, which saw JD becoming one of the largest shareholders in Tiki. By September, the company continued to gain another 122 billion Vietnamese dong (US$5.2 million) from tech firm VNG.

Meanwhile, within just the first six months of 2018, Shopee Vietnam gained 1.2 billion Vietnamese dong (US$51,770) from Sea Group, its Singapore-based parent company.