Vietnam leads in phone e-commerce growth

Vietnam is the fastest-growing market in South East Asia in terms of mobile e-commerce growth, says the latest report on Southeast Asia’s 2017 e-commerce status by iPrice.

In the past 12 months, mobile phone usage in Việt Nam has grown on an average of 19 per cent, accounting for 72 per cent of the overall e-commerce Web traffic. In comparison to other Southeast Asian countries, Việt Nam enjoyed the steepest growth at 26 per cent.

However, in absolute terms, Indonesia is leading mobile e-commerce, with 87 per cent of the traffic coming from mobile phones. Meanwhile, traffic via personal computers is less than 30 per cent in all countries in the region.

Việt Nam is also the leader in website conversion rate, which measures the percentage of website visitors that turn into customers, with a conversion rate of up to 65 per cent, closely followed by Singapore and Indonesia.

Meanwhile, with the low use of credit cards (except in Singapore), e-commerce merchants are offering more payment options to reach out to shoppers.

In Việt Nam, 86 per cent of merchants offer online payment, while cash on delivery is offered by more than 80 per cent of the players. Besides this, in both Việt Nam and Thailand, almost 50 per cent of the merchants offer offline point of sales.

This is due to the popularity of online to offline e-commerce models, such as Thế giới di động (Vietnam Mobile World), FPT Shop and Nguyễn Kim, the report said.

However, due to lower gross domestic product per capita (US$6,880) compared to other countries in the region, Việt Nam has the lowest basket size, with an average order value of just $23.

iPrice’s data was collected from over 1,000 e-commerce players operating in the six largest Southeast Asian markets, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines and Việt Nam.