In this week’s edition of Comscore Snapshots, we look at the consumption of retail-related services in the Asia-Pacific region. Our analysis includes statistics for Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Vietnam.
Scope: We include websites and mobile apps that provide retail services such as apparel, consumer electronics, home furnishing, fragrance and cosmetics and sports/outdoor. Examples include Amazon and Alibaba.
Top line observations:
Table 1: Whilst we know that e-commerce is very much suited to mobile, it is important for advertisers not to disregard the desktop completely. In this table we consider the year-on-year change in visits to retail-related sites on desktop for all markets in the region and including mobile for Indonesia, Malaysia and India. The impact of recent events on the e-commerce category in the Asia-Pacific region has been varied. For six of the markets included, traffic to retail-related sites has decreased year-on-year, however, for the remaining four there have been positive increases, notably in Australia with an over 10% increase year-on-year.
Table 2: In almost all markets, many entities have managed to reach at least 1% of online consumers and a smaller proportion of these entities have reached over 5%. The Asia-Pacific e-commerce market is highly competitive, particularly in India where we see over 60 companies reaching more than 1% of consumers. Whether this can be sustained remains to be seen.
Table 3: The retail category in the Asia-Pacific region is dominated by large multi-national e-commerce sites which offer a wide variety of products. These large businesses have captured large market. However, as table 2 shows, there is a great deal of competition in the region and these giants will need to stay on top of their game to maintain their positions.
Table 1. Reach of retail-related websites and apps
% reach of total digital population
Year-on-Year percentage points variation (Nov 2020 vs Nov 2019)
Australia
65.0
11.6
China
64.8
-10.2
Hong Kong
62.9
8.9
India
89.4
-5.7
Indonesia
71.4
0.8
Japan
48.6
-3.0
Malaysia
70.6
-1.0
Singapore
38.7
-2.2
Taiwan
86.3
3.9
Vietnam
12.0
-5.4
Source: Comscore MMX Multi-Platform, Total Audience, Nov 2020, Asia-Pacific region. (N.B. desktop only for all markets except India, Indonesia and Malaysia which include mobile)
Table 2. Market competitiveness and consumer adoption of retail-related sites and apps
Number of retail-related websites or mobile apps that reach more than 1% of the total digital population
Number of retail-related websites or mobile apps that reach more than 5% of the total digital population
24
6
15
4
32
62
10
28
47
7
20
3
39
8
0
Source: Comscore MMX Multi-Platform, Total Audience, Nov 2020, Asia-Pacific region.
Table 3. Top retail-related sites and apps
Country
Entity
Description
Amazon Sites
Multinational technology company specializing in e-commerce
Alibaba.com Corporation
HKTVMALL.COM
Shopping and entertainment platform
Shopee.co.id
Shopee.com.my
Fubon Multimedia Technology
TV, online and catalogue retail specialist
Shopee.vn