Tiki set out to be Vietnam’s answer to Amazon. Now it’s charting its own path

Amazon is one of the world’s most valuable companies. Today, it sells everything from electronics to clothes to musical instruments and pet supplies. It has branched out into groceries, hardware devices, content streaming, and cloud and data services.

It’s easy to forget that US ecommerce giant started out as an online bookseller, with Jeff Bezos shipping books out of his garage.

It’s the backstory that inspired Vietnamese marketing exec Tran Ngoc Thai Son to do the same thing for his country.

When Tran founded Tiki in 2010, it started as – you guessed it – an online bookseller. He wanted Vietnamese consumers to have the same online shopping experience as their counterparts in the US. Like Bezos before him, Tran recognized that books were a vertical with a limited offline selection, but plenty of demand – almost perfect for setting up an online retail platform.

Before long, Tiki began to diversify beyond books. Today, the nine-year-old firm sells products across 26 different categories, totaling over 1.2 million stock keeping units (SKUs), chief business officer Kartick Narayan tells Tech in Asia.

“We have tens of thousands of books today in our portfolio,” he adds, underlining Tiki’s continued commitment to its roots. “What we started as a book-only ecommerce company is now diversified into everything from motorcycles, digital services like cancer insurance, mobile top-up, and electronic household appliances.”

Homegrown player

Across Southeast Asia, the battle for ecommerce leadership is largely fought between two Singapore-based companies: Lazada, owned by Alibaba, and Shopee, part of NYSE-listed Sea Group.

But in Vietnam, the lay of the land is a little different. Homegrown player Tiki is jostling with the duo for dominance.

It won’t disclose gross merchandise volume (GMV) or revenue figures, though Narayan confirms that GMV has consistently grown by at least 3x over every year of its existence, and 3.3x during 2018.

One publicly available metric which gives an indication of the company’s performance is web page visits.

According to market research firm iPrice, which uses estimates from SimilarWeb, Shopee tops the country in terms of monthly visits as of January this year, followed by Tiki, Lazada, and fellow Vietnamese site Sendo.

See: A fast-growing Vietnamese ecommerce site is leaping into education

Both of Tiki’s closest competitors are regional businesses, with proven experience in cross-border operations. That could give them the edge over Tiki as it considers its options for international expansion. But Truong Dang, content marketing executive and Vietnam analyst at iPrice, thinks the Vietnamese company may have a few aces up its sleeve.

Cross-border sweet spot

Behind the scenes