Graphic: The movers and shakers of Southeast Asia ecommerce

Who are the movers and shakers in Southeast Asia ecommerce? In this infographic, we at Metisa compared a few of them across Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore in terms of traffic, engagement metrics, and major customer acquisition and retention channels.

The goal was to compare these players in a transparent, independent, and neutral manner and see what observations could be drawn. This analysis is based on traffic for the month of February 2017.

The traffic data you will see is sourced from a third-party, independent source called SimilarWeb. They combine several sources of data including local internet service providers, monitored devices, web crawlers, and direct measurement sources to come up with estimates of traffic data, time on site, bounce rate, and other metrics.

Do also note that the data only considers web and mobile traffic. Nowadays, a lot of ecommerce engagement is on native mobile apps. While there is definitely a correlation between mobile web and native mobile traffic, this means you should take the analysis with a grain of salt.

Some observations

Who are the biggest players?

• A lot of the ecommerce web and mobile web traffic—for instance, from Lazada, Tokopedia, Elevenia, Bukalapak—hail from Indonesia, which is indicative of the early potential of a 250 million strong population.
• Horizontally integrated ecommerce players tend to adopt a marketplace model. This means they opt for a leaner model with less operational and inventory risk.
• Niche, vertical players like Reebonz and FashionValet are more likely to adopt inventory models where they can provide greater convenience, service, and speed to their customers

Who has the best customer engagement?

• Traffic or users, a metric that investors commonly look at, does not necessarily reflect an ecommerce player’s financial performance. The data shows that the quality of users differs widely across platforms.
• Many niche players tend to have customers who are more engaged, spending more time on site and viewing more pages. This could be a sign that their customer lifetime values are higher and could be closer to profitability, but at a smaller scale.

How are they acquiring customers?

• Most traffic still comes from direct and search.
• Despite all the hype about social, the platform still contributes a small percentage of traffic (less than 10 percent) consistently across retailers.
• Traffic from mail ranges widely between players. This tells us that a lot of players have been successful with their life cycle marketing and campaign mail strategies. This could be an area of opportunity for other players.
• Certain players have much more referral- and partnership-driven models.

Hope you enjoyed this infographic. We look forward to reading your comments, feedback, and tips on how we can improve the usefulness of the information we just shared.

(Update: This infographic was first updated on April 5 to reflect more accurate figures from the companies’ cumulative SEA businesses and again on April 6 to reflect minor changes.)