July 15, 2020 
Today’s shoppers prefer to shop online, and no one can deny this fact. The reasons are manifold.
Data from Shopify, in the year 2019, indicates that eCommerce sales on different platforms worldwide will go up to US$1.4 trillion by 2023.
In the Asia-Pacific region including Southeast Asia, 57.9% of the shopper’s tendency of buying products from abroad is one of the major factors which will be contributing to this worldwide eCommerce evolution.
Overview
Addressing our retail issues via the desktop or mobile application of the top online platforms has never been this easy before.
Coupled with growing purchasing power and better internet access, this handiness and convenience convince the buyers to spend more, and beyond our necessities and our own countries’ boundaries, year after year.
Thus, it became challenging to meet today’s consumers’ expectations as they are demanding a more specialized and wider array of stores and products. Supply must meet demand and retailers must answer accordingly.
However, all retailers don’t have the time, resources, money, etc. Building their own online stores from scratch also seems a greater challenge to them.
Hence, they prefer to sign up with established eCommerce platforms, most of the time. Using the pre-existing infrastructure and analytics seems the best and fastest option for them in order to grow their eCommerce businesses.
Changing Landscape
The bigger question raises with bigger challenges. With the beginning of the new decade, pandemic took us through a huge economic turmoil that affected eCommerce business based on fashion, luxury, electronics, self-care, cosmetics, and more.
Buyers took time to cope with this crisis and eCommerce businesses were transformed with a new set of new-age digital trends.
Despite all that, there’s a tremendous possibility for the eCommerce industry to recover what is lost as buyers’ psyche is not to lament over a crisis but to escape the situation and feel happy.
So, if the question is on the eCommerce business in South-eastern Asia, let’s understand how the major businesses work and where they are today.
The Top Players in Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore
Lazada
Let’s start with the king of Southeast Asia eCommerce platforms, Lazada, which is also a part of Alibaba Group (along with Taobao and AliExpress).
It’s the top-most eCommerce platform in Southeast Asia when to achieves the highest monthly average visits and app downloads.
Things Lazada sells you can even think of – including those you normally wouldn’t prefer to buy online personally, like the new BMW 1 Series by the year 2019.
Shopee
Shopee is one of the top-most companies which to give Lazada a strong competition in terms of customer retention and gross merchandise volume or GMV.
In fact, in the first financial quarter, it has overtaken Lazada as Shopee received 184.4 M visits throughout its desktop and mobile websites while Lazada’s website visit stopped at 179.7 million.
Zalora
With a presence in four other countries, Zalora is another top eCommerce platform in Southeast Asia.
Sharing its roots with Lazada through Rocket Internet, Zalora has focused early on women’s, men’s, and kids’ fashion with a more specific approach.
While the other eCommerce marketplaces gradually moved to brick-and-mortar setups, Zalora preferred to stay.
eBay
Being involved in an ongoing retail battle with one of the most famous and world-wide known eCommerce marketplaces, eBay is known to be the survivor of the 90s online-shopping era.
eBay is still a major player for used products at cheaper rate or discounted items in the countries like Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Zilingo
Another name, we can’t go without mentioning while talking about Southeast Asia ecommerce marketplace is Zilingo, one of the biggest mobile shoppers of fashion, lifestyle, cosmetics, and self-care products in Indonesia and Thailand.
A few more names in list are Hermo, a Malaysian beauty and cosmetics retailer with a branch in Singapore; Qoo10, an ecommerce marketplace in Southeast Asia, headquartered in Singapore with its growing popularity and JD.com, a Chinese retailer, growing strong in Indonesia and Vietnam, and later expanded to Thailand. However, JD.com is one of the biggest eCommerce marketplaces.
Leading platforms in Indonesia
According to the study by iPrice and App Annie, shoppers in Indonesia prefer to have a combination of generalized yet specific eCommerce platforms.
- The list starts with Tokopedia, a unicorn start-up which got investments worth US$1.1 billion. The approach of C2C transaction and customer services makes it different from any other ecommerce platforms.
- As the list goes on, we see Bukalapak and Blibli.com, quite different in their retail approach for international shoppers,giving Indonesians the most extensive coverage for product range, and cater to every consumer’s need as a hub like Lazada and Shopee.
- Further, Sociolla played their cards in the beauty and cosmetics industry and attracted maximum shoppers go here for personal care products for women and men.
- In contrary, mother-and-baby care product-focused platform, Orami, has a broad range of goods for that segment with free shipping in Indonesia.
Major Players in Philippines & Vietnam
- A popular Filipino electronics-only website, Argo Mall is a four-year-old site, ranked 4th on App Annie and iPrice’s surveys for its maximum traffic for a board range of electronics products and big brands of smartphones, smartwatches, mobile phones, accessories, TV sets, laptops, etc.
- In just a few years, BeautyMNL has swiftly risen in the rankings for both the traffic and monthly active users on its webstore. Their collection of products ranges from cosmetics, beauty, health & wellness, consumer goods, F&B sectors, etc. along with its recent venture in selling fast fashion, swimwear, and sports apparel.
- TiKi and Sendo ranked amongst the top 5 of App Annie’s Q1 lists while TiKi is a notable name in Vietnam as a travel planning website along with their usual consumer-product lineup, hotel reservation and flights, Sendo has its unique product- and service-line including movie tickets, bill payment and more.
