Doris Yu · · 3 min readShopee dominates mobile, but others have ‘ample room’ to catch up: report
Shopee has surpassed Alibaba-backed Lazada as the most used ecommerce app in Southeast Asia in the second half of 2019, latest data from iPrice, App Annie, and SimilarWeb show.
Photo credit: Shopee
The Map of Ecommerce report for Q4 2019 shows that Shopee raked in the most number of monthly active users and downloads, overtaking Lazada. In terms of web visits, Shopee also takes the top spot with over 2 billion visits, followed by Lazada with around 1.8 billion visits.
According to iPrice, Shopee has been performing well across the region since Q1 2019, ranking first in mobile usage since the third quarter. “Shopee’s prominence in the top position is mainly spurred by its backing from a large company like Tencent,” the price comparison site told Tech in Asia.
Various user acquisition and brand awareness initiatives, including recent marketing campaigns that involved prominent brand ambassadors and product diversification, has led to this growth, iPrice said.
Last year, the ecommerce site introduced a livestreaming feature, Shopee Live, on its app and had football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo in its promotional activities. It also held the 12.12 Shopee Super Show in Vietnam.
But while Shopee ranked first in mobile usage in Indonesia and Vietnam, Lazada remained dominant in the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia, according to the report.
Shopee has not yet turned a profit. Its parent firm, Sea, reported a net loss of over US$1.4 billion for 2019, in which cost of service for its ecommerce unit and other related services accounted for most of the loss. Alibaba, on the other hand, reported around US$1 billion in revenue for its international commerce retail business, accounting for only 5% of Alibaba’s total revenue of US$23.2 billion for the quarter ended December 31, 2019.
Despite Shopee’s success in mobile usage, “there is still ample room for other ecommerce platforms such as Tokopedia, Bukalapak, and others to catch up to the top spot,” iPrice said.
In terms of most used ecommerce apps in the region, Indonesian ecommerce firms Tokopedia and Bukalapak followed in third and fourth places, respectively.
Citing data from the Indonesian Internet Providers Association, iPrice said that about 56% of internet users in the country never made ecommerce transactions and that about 53% of them have never visited any ecommerce platform. This, along with the government’s plan to ramp up internet usage in the country, is advantageous for local ecommerce firms “as they pride themselves as a homegrown company that highly localizes their business for Indonesians.”
The archipelago is also expected to generate US$82 billion in online retail sales by 2025 and account for over 50% of the region’s ecommerce market due to increasing internet access, according to Statista.
The Map of Ecommerce report also highlighted three up-and-comers in the region. Vietnam’s Sendo has been the fifth most downloaded ecommerce app for two consecutive quarters, while US-based Wish rose from the ranks in the second half of 2019 to become the fourth most downloaded app in Southeast Asia. Singapore-based Zilingo, meanwhile, was one of the few fashion e-tailers to make it to the top 10.
Editing by Charmaine de Lazo and Miguel Cordon
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