Mobile eCommerce; Recently I had the opportunity to leaf through Econsultancy’s excellent report “Understanding the Customer Journey in the Asia Pacific”. Produced in association with Emarsys, this important research explores how Asian Pacific companies are working to engage online consumers, across a variety of touch-points. And increasingly mobile eCommerce.
The research is based on a survey of almost 1,000 digital marketers and Mobile eCommerce professionals in the Asia Pacific region and was carried out in the final 3rd of 2016.
I believe that just as with video, mobile’s coming adoption by most leading regional e-tailers will mark this year’s report as the last where desktop leads the charts for mapping customers’ journeys, however as of the end of last year, it still captivated marketeers’ attention. Interestingly when mobiles results for the first and second choice are combined, it dominated the attention of roughly three-quarters of respondents.
There no doubt mobile is firmly established as APAC’s primary eCommerce platform.
Criteo’s “State of Mobile Commerce“ report found 54% of all Mobile eCommerce transactions in Southeast Asia in the first half of 2016 were already conducted on a mobile device. Additionally, mobile apps saw higher order values than desktop and mobile web for the first time
These figures represent a 19% year-over-year region-wide increase, however, at the national level we see massive skewing in mobile’s favour for certain countries. In Indonesia for example, 83% of the transactions logged for the period, were on smartphones.
The true volume of mobile eCommerce in SEA is essentially impossible to trace, but it’s clearly way above the reported volumes.
In Thailand for example, the majority of digital and mobile commerce actually follows a pattern wherein sellers use Instagram and Facebook as shopfronts, Line and Whatsapp for customer relations, and conclude their transactions via bank or mobile transfer.
The simple truth is that no report can’t account for the region’s unparalleled social commerce phenomenon, which occurs, for the large part, outside the realm of known platforms.
Despite the obvious opportunity for personalized digital marketing, most companies say they lack the systems (79%), data (74%) and analysis skills (68%) to effectively map the mobile customer journey. This represents a massive opportunity for early adopters, who easily have 2-3 years to dominate before the mass of the market finally catches up. It seems that as with all things, ASEAN’s nascent digital ecosystem will see the early birds getting the juiciest worms, leaving the stragglers to scratch out leftover scraps…
