Revealing the Most Popular E-Commerce Services in Indonesia

Jasmine often shop online. For personal use, especially buying smartphone accessories, Grocery, and others he trusts a service from China, JD.id. The reason was quite simple, he believed in tagline #Guaranteed, which only sells original products. The question of price or fast delivery was not the first choice.

On the other hand, for Adel, free shipping is actually the main trigger. No wonder he chose Shopee Indonesia as his favorite e-commerce service.

All of these reasons revolve around how e-commerce services capture the needs and wants of consumers. No longer tempted by discounts or promos, consumers are looking for personal satisfaction, because it is easier to buy the desired product.

Tokopedia, Bukalapak, and Shopee shot up

iPrice Group, a metasearch engine service provider operating in Southeast Asia, recently presented The Map of E-commerce Indonesia which peels the map of e-commerce services based on average quarterly traffic, mobile application ranking, social media followers and the number of employees. The latest data results are based on Q2 2018 data.

Interesting things that become highlight is the acceleration of Tokopedia and Bukalapak as e-commerce services with the highest traffic, above Lazada, which has been dominating the Southeast Asian market. Indeed, the metrics used only count browser traffic (desktop and mobile) and do not calculate application usage, but this data shows a shift in how Indonesian consumers choose their favorite e-commerce services.

To DailySocial, Head of Corporate Communications Tokopedia Priscilla Anais revealed, Tokopedia was visited by more than 73 million people (unique visits) Indonesia per month (sites and applications), with a total monthly visit of 332 million (total visits), in May 2018.

The interesting thing that made Tokopedia experienced a surge in visitors in the second quarter of 2018 was the Ramadhan Extra online shopping festival. This program presents hundreds of exclusive products, flash sale, and very attractive discounts for various Ramadan needs.

It is stated that 80% of the use of Tokopedia services is mobile-based, in line with the behavior of Indonesian consumers who are mobile first and increasingly affordable smartphone prices.

Meanwhile, Bukalapak's Chief Strategy Officer, Teddy Oetomo, told: DailySocial, revealed that Bukalapak could not justify or blame the results of the iPrice calculation.

Teddy detailed, based on data held by Bukalapak, traffic in Q2 2018 increased almost 3 times compared to Q2 2017, while the number of active user increased up to 2 times. Throughout Q2 2018, Bukalapak recorded the highest number of users using the Android platform, followed by mobile web and desktops.

What is no less interesting is the success of Shopee as a service that occupies the first position in the realm of mobile applications, both for Android and iOS. This figure is quite surprising, considering that Shopee has only been here for three years competing in Indonesia.

Country Brand Manager for Shopee Indonesia, Rezki Yanuar to DailySocial said, according to data collected by iPrice, Shopee has been focusing on mobile application innovation. According to data collected by Shopee, currently Shopee has been downloaded more than 61 million times with an average of 110 million visits per month. More than 95% of Shopee users make transactions via smartphones.

Survey to the community

To support this data, DailySocial conducted a survey, in collaboration with JakPat, to find out the respondent's favorite e-commerce service. The survey was conducted on 2026 respondents throughout Indonesia.

Based on this survey, Shopee turned out to be the most frequently used e-commerce service by respondents (34%). The next position is followed by Tokopedia (28%), Bukalapak (17,5%) and Lazada (14%). Blibli occupies a caretaker position in terms of popularity in the community.

Furthermore, the results of this survey reveal that an e-commerce service is considered a favorite for reasons of more affordable prices (31%), discount promos (26%), variety of product choices (19%), and free shipping (15%).

Future potential

McKinsey study in 2016 predicts that by 2025 the impact of the digital economy on Indonesia could increase GDP by up to $35 billion and add 3,7 million new jobs.

According to idEA Chairman Ignatius Untung, in the future the competition between e-commerce services will be increasingly fierce. It takes a lot of money to run a business. Those who do not have a strategy will be threatened with mergers, acquisitions or forced to go out of business. E-commerce that is still trying to find and build loyal buyers by providing low prices, will experience difficulties.

Of the top six industry players, three e-commerce services in Indonesia have Alibaba-affiliated investors, namely Lazada (full acquisition), Tokopedia, and Bukalapak (through Ant Financial). While the other two services are affiliated with Tencent, namely Shopee and JD.id. Only Blibli is purely owned by a local conglomerate through GDP Venture.

"Because in the end the products sold are the same, today brand A can be cheaper, but other days it can be replaced. For this reason, it is possible that players will start focusing on more unique areas. Not just as long as it's cheaper, because everything can be cheap with promos , said Lucky.