Taiwan site claims it has surpassed Shopee as island’s top ecommerce platform

Downtown Taipei viewed from Xiangshan. Photo credit: outcast85 / 123RF.

Taiwan C2C online marketplace PChomestore today claimed it has surpassed Shopee as the island’s biggest ecommerce player – and has again brought Shopee parent Sea’s pre-IPO assertions about its dominance in certain Asian markets into question.

Remember the spat between Sea and Lazada over which was Southeast Asia’s biggest ecommerce player a few weeks back?

That squabble was partly to do with Sea’s inclusion of Taiwan – which accounted for well over a third of its ecommerce platform Shopee’s orders in Q2 2017 – within an area defined as “Greater Southeast Asia” (GSEA).

Lazada’s CEO suggested that Sea’s use of this fairly uncommon categorization helped it stake a claim to be the region’s leading ecommerce firm – a crown that Lazada itself has asserted as its own for several years.

Taiwan accounted for between 36 percent and 38 percent of all the orders it received.

Sea reported in its initial public offering (IPO) prospectus that Shopee was Taiwan’s number one by both total orders and gross merchandise volume (GMV) – or the total value of sales over a given time period – during H1 2017, as well as taking top spot across the whole of GSEA by both metrics.

Now, PChomestore – part of the PChome group of businesses – is claiming that it has overtaken Shopee as the island’s top ecommerce platform. The C2C firm today announced that its annualized monthly orders have just exceeded 6 million, which – according to PChomestore – means it has supplanted Shopee in Taiwan’s ecommerce market in terms of orders.

Doing the math

In its IPO prospectus, Sea says that Shopee received a total of 45.5 million orders across GSEA in Q2 2017. It also said that Taiwan accounted for between 36 percent and 38 percent of all the orders it received over the same period.

Using the 38 percent figure, we extrapolate that Shopee received 17.3 million orders from Taiwan during the second quarter. Averaged out over the three months in that quarter, we get 5.8 million orders per month in Taiwan – falling just short of PChomestore’s claimed 6 million. However, it’s worth remembering that those Shopee numbers are already a few months old and are based on quarterly stats – so a direct comparison with PChomestore’s annualized figure may not tell the whole story.

A spokesperson for PChomestore confirmed to Tech in Asia that the company arrived at its own figure through the same method, adding that the calculation “was based on both a statistical comparison between PChome’s and Shopee’s public announcements, as well as data from PChome’s internal research.”

Sea told Tech in Asia that it is unable to comment during its pre-IPO quiet period.