Report: Indonesia now has 74.6 million internet users; this is what they do online

Credit: Marketeers

Indonesia is one of the most promising tech markets in Asia, so it is quite important for us (and for companies) to understand more about web user behavior in the country. For this reason, market research company Markplus Insight and online magazine Marketeers reveal their latest survey ¹ about netizens’ behavior in Indonesia. It covers web penetration, online shopping behavior, and favorite brands.

Who’s online

The survey reveals that Indonesia now has 74.6 million internet users, a 22 percent increase from last year’s 61.1 million. That number will pass 100 million in 2015.

The study also counts “netizen penetration”, wherein a netizen is defined as someone who spends at least three hours online per day. Indonesia now has 31.7 million of them this year, an increase from 24.2 million people last year. The study notes that the netizen penetration rate increased by a meager three percent.

Almost half of the netizens in Indonesia are aged below 30, while people above 45 years of age make up 16.7 percent of netizens in the country. Most netizens access the web via smartphones (86 percent) and spend between IDR 50,000 ($5) and IDR 100,000 ($10) every month for internet access.

Online shopping behavior

20 percent of netizens shop online in Indonesia, just a five percent increase compared to last year. Most of these shoppers are female. The three most popular items bought by these netizens are pretty obvious: clothing (67.1 percent), shoes (20.2 percent), and bags (20.0 percent). 14 percent of these netizens spend an average of IDR 200,000 ($20) for online shopping in the last one year.

Netizens prefer to conduct their online shopping activities on messenger groups like BBM groups (27.0 percent), online forum or classifieds sites like Kaskus and TokoBagus (26.6 percent), and social media (26.4 percent) rather than on conventional online shopping sites (20.0 percent). People prefer messenger groups is because they’re more trusted, easy to access, simple, and sometimes they know the seller personally. Price is still the biggest factor that drives online shopping decisions.

When it comes to payment methods, bank transfers account for 80.7 percent of all transactions. Second and third places go to cash-on-delivery (27.1 percent) and credit cards (2.5 percent).

96 percent of netizens say they’ve never bought original software products. Perhaps that’s because it’s very easy to find pirated products here and there’s not much law enforcement to handle this.

(See also: 6 facts that you should know about cash-on-delivery in Indonesia)

Digital media is taking over the traditional business

Favorite brands

Google Plus popular among older folks