According to 2018 e-Conomy Southeast Asia report, Southeast Asia is on course to achieve $240 billion by 2025. Although this seems exciting to all business people, the competition is also huge. To stay relevant, you must consider the technological advancement and changes in consumer behaviour that will affect your business success, especially in Southeast Asia.

Mobile Adoption

Smartphone users are growing rapidly especially in Southeast Asia. According to the figure below, people in Southeast Asia is mobile-first and often mobile-only. Having a minimum budget and late adopters of desktop, many don’t have a desktop and choose to buy a smartphone instead because a smartphone is enough as already has many functions.

From this insight, you should seriously consider mobile phone users and make sure your platform is mobile-friendly. You can also invest in mobile-app if it is suitable for your business.

Data Utilization

One of the advantages of online retail compared to offline is you can track, collect, monitor and manage data. Using data analytics tool, brands are able to access customer data in your business related platforms such as website and social media. Data can be utilized to devise your online strategies. Research shows that 73 per cent of brands uses their e-commerce budget on data analytics in 2019. This shows how important the data is.

Reagan Chai, head of regional business intelligence and development at Shopee, told that data acquisition facilitates the company to plan out and optimize buyer and seller user experience while acquiring customer demand and predicting future potential. Shopee successfully increased their website traffic in the past year which exceeds that of other regional players.

Two big companies in China, Alibaba and JD also utilize data to improve inventories and experiences at their physical stores.

Social Commerce

Social commerce in the region already flourished before e-commerce grew to what we see today. The social network’s speedy growth in Southeast Asia is driven by mobile adoption, where 90 per cent of the online population accesses the internet using smartphones.

Brands have directly recognised social commerce as alternative sales channels. Like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest have also developed their own shopping features on their platforms.

Deb Liu, vice president of Facebook Marketplace said the best way to get feedback from consumers is by having a direct conversation. Brands will miss out if they don’t have a social media presence.

User-generated Content

Before reaching a decision to purchase something, people start with analyzing product information and reviews on that platform. They also look for opinions from other people such as friends to verify products.

Consumers in Southeast Asia is not familiar with giving product reviews on e-commerce platforms. And when they do, the reviews often contain little information about the product, delivery time, packaging and others.

Edouard Steinert, director of channel management at aCommerce Thailand, said consumers want to know genuine feedback and reviews about a product and become more reluctant to hard-sell methods. User-generated reviews showed to drive better conversion. This could save your time, improve results, and keep costs low.

Improved Logistics

Logistics play an important role in the success of any e-commerce business. In order to achieve good growth in crowded and competitive e-commerce business and to satisfy today’s tech-savvy customers with no-error service and excellent delivery, e-commerce companies are going logistic way.

To provide excellent logistics services for their customers, e-commerce companies choose third-party logistics providers. It is difficult to manage in-house logistics that is why e-commerce companies turn to third-party providers to all logistics stuff such as handle orders, fulfillment, shipping and returns.

The person who delivers products to the customer is the face of that e-commerce company for that customer. Because he is the one who is responsible for timely product delivery, communicates with the customer, and build a rapport with the customer.

In a real situation, the customer will meet the person who delivers products like the face of that e-commerce company. The delivery guy the one who is responsible to make sure product delivery is on-time, talks with the customer, and build an agreement with the customer.

So if anything happens, this will give a bad reputation to the e-commerce company. It becomes important for an e-commerce company to keep track of the delivery staff. And for this, e-commerce companies partner with good logistics who are excel in their work approach.

With an excellent track record dealing with fulfillment and tracking service, AllSome helps e-commerce company to have great logistics experience in term of warehousing, packaging, order tracking and shipping. A smooth and simplest way of fulfillment and tracking system, these already proved to get the customers satisfaction and result in bringing a good reputation to the e-commerce company.