APAC’s smartphone market a growing opportunity for ecommerce players

Smartphones have become an indispensable part of our everyday lives, and nowhere is this more pronounced than in the Asia Pacific region, which has roughly 1.5 billion smartphone users. Indeed, smartphones have become the dominant way of accessing the internet in many parts of the region, recently surpassing PC connections for the first time.

With a sizable, ever-growing base of smartphone users comes demand – a lot of it. Each year, over 500 million smartphones are sold in the region.

While most of the sales today are still conducted through “traditional” channels (e.g., through telecommunications carriers, specialized electronics stores, and mom and pop shops), a combination of industry trends is shifting demand away from these platforms. These include government regulations that curtail device and mobile plan bundling, and a precipitous increase in preference for online shopping among consumers.

As such, ecommerce firms like Lazada, Shopee, Tokopedia, and Rakuten are now uniquely positioned to tap into one of APAC’s most deeply rooted and voluminous industries.

In particular, five innovations that are unique to ecommerce allow the digital platform to fully leverage the opportunity and revolutionize consumer shopping.

Endless options

With a catalog consisting of tens of thousands of mobile device selections, ecommerce players like Lazada provide consumers with an endless array of options, filtered by literally every user preference possible: RAM, price, screen size, battery type, processor type, etc.

Nowhere else will consumers get a more exhaustive list of options to choose from, available within the few seconds it takes to click one’s product preferences and for the page to refresh. Optionality when it comes to smart devices is vital today, as the market has become hypercompetitive and the smallest differences between products can set them apart from one another.

Convenience

Consider this: Approximately 80% of consumers that shop for smartphones in a traditional brick and mortar store go online – often when they’re already in the shop – to do research before deciding on a final purchase.

By resorting to ecommerce instead of going to physical stores, the vast majority of smartphone buyers will benefit from being able to conduct a more convenient and more thorough pre-purchase research, an indispensable step in the purchase journey.

“Always-on” promotions

It’s hard to dispute the sheer scalability and prevalence of ecommerce sales promotions and online shopping festivals that lure in consumers with insanely attractive and cost-saving opportunities. During 2019’s Single’s Day, for example, many top smartphone models were paired with discounts of up to 40%.

Furthermore, merchants are increasingly experimenting with purchase incentive bundles, such as offering free trial subscriptions for Netflix or Spotify with the purchase of select devices. Ecommerce makes it easy to deploy such promotions by implementing them at scale, allowing seamless user redemption (e.g., online link or redemption code) and launching in-site recommendations/targeting ads to reach the right consumers.

User engagement

User engagement is key in today’s world of consumerism where buyers are increasingly looking for immersive, interactive, and social experiences in their path to purchase.

This is especially true with smartphones, given the emotional purchase drivers involved. Ecommerce enables more scalable and innovative ways of driving user engagement in the purchase journey through different ways:

Measurement and testing