BPS Still Struggling to Collect E-Commerce Data in Indonesia

Aiming to summarize informal e-commerce data in Indonesia, the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) requested the assistance of the Coordinating Ministry for the Economy in the near future. According to the Head of BPS Suhariyanto, this data collection is crucial to be carried out in order to formulate policies regarding economic potential in the future.

So far, in addition to major e-commerce services that are present in Indonesia, there are also many sellers who market their products using social media. According to BPS, the increasing sales of goods through social media is enough to make it difficult for BPS to collect existing data. BPS itself previously had plans to collect e-commerce service data in the first or second week of January 2018. The data includes transactions, turnover, technology, foreign and domestic investments, and payment methods.

In particular, BPS defines nine categories of e-commerce services, including marketplace, transportation, logistics, payments, and investment companies. So far, the data obtained from idEA covers 320 business actors.

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BPS said that it was still unable to obtain accurate data from major e-commerce services in Indonesia. The data that has been collected by BPS at this time is still around data on the number of employees and types of commodities with changes in the flow of goods (turnover) which is fairly fast. The data is still not equipped with turnover data that has been collected by e-commerce services so far.

Although the target for releasing this information has passed (the plan is February 2018), BPS still has plans to collect more complete data. BPS has not been able to provide a target for the completion of the process, because this is the first time that cooperation with the Coordinating Ministry for the Economy has been carried out.

Later these calculations can also be used as a reference e-commerce roadmap national, and reference for calculating inflation. This will help determine the actual condition and portion of the related industry, labor absorption, and consumer behavior.