A snapshot of Indonesia’s ecommerce scene as companies brace for Amazon’s arrival

Amazon has kicked off in Singapore with its “most aggressive service yet,” offering the Prime Now two-hour delivery service on everything from chilled Tiger beer to Samsung mobile phones. But Singapore may just be a small step for the ecommerce giant before they spread to other Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia.

Existing ecommerce companies in Indonesia are seemingly predicting the move, preparing themselves for the big battle. On May 2017, Sea (formerly known as Garena) raised US$550 million to back their Indonesian ecommerce platform, Shopee. A few weeks ago, we also heard that Alibaba is expected to invest in one of the biggest marketplace players in Indonesia, Tokopedia, for up to US$500 million.

At iPrice, we just released the latest version of our interactive content, The Map of E-Commerce Indonesia, which looks at data from April to June 2017. (For more information on the methodology of the study, click the link to the study’s main page or go to their data bank here.)

Here are some interesting findings from the data.

Lazada is widening the gap with Tokopedia for web visits

Based on the data we took from SimilarWeb, Lazada is still the champion for web visits with 58.3 million average monthly visits. Tokopedia is second with 50.7 million.

The gap between Lazada and Tokopedia is wider this time around compared to the previous period (January to March), where Lazada had 51.1 million average monthly visits and Tokopedia reached 46.5 million.

We believe this is because Lazada already had an idea that Amazon would arrive in Southeast Asia. So, they are optimizing their website to secure Indonesian online shoppers.

According to Kissmetrics, site speed is a factor that customers look for in an ecommerce site. So, we compared the page load times for Lazada, Tokopedia, and Bukalapak. We loaded their “Nike Football Shoes” page, and here are the results:

• Lazada: 3.50 seconds
• Bukalapak: 7.48 seconds
• Tokopedia: 7.49 seconds

Tokopedia is still the strongest local player

In comparison with other Indonesian ecommerce players, Tokopedia has appeared consistently as the top one or two companies in five out of six of our Map of E-Commerce study parameters.

Here are the statistics for Tokopedia:

Lazada, Tokopedia, Bukalapak, and Mataharimall, always appear in the Top 10 list

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