2018 was another highly successful year for Vietnamese ecommerce companies. While Shopee and Lazada broke one record after another during their big sales campaigns, the local competitors Tiki and Sendo also received huge investment capital to improve their fighting chances.

Furthermore, these Vietnamese companies’ progresses were significant enough to put them among the most successful ecommerce platforms in Southeast Asia in 2018, according to a new report from the price comparison website iPrice Group.

2^nd biggest market in Southeast Asia

In the report, iPrice ranks the 10 most successful ecommerce platforms in 2018 based on average monthly web traffic. The final result shows that among this top 10, five of them are currently conducting business in Vietnam, including: Lazada, Shopee, Tiki, Thegioididong and Sendo.

While Lazada are Shopee are international corporations with operations in multiple markets, which makes their positions in the list less of a surprise, the remaining three’s inclusion is a concrete evidence for the size and potential of ecommerce business in Vietnam.

In particular, even though Sendo, Tiki and Thegioididong are only available for consumers within Vietnam, their traffic numbers are still impressive enough to put them within the regional top 10, even above JD Group of China, which is now operating in both Thailand and Indonesia.

The most remarkable however is Thegioididong. The company is the only merchant in this top 10 to focus on only one product category - electronic devices. Even with such a narrow business scope, Thegioididong still managed to gain an average of 29 million visits per month.

These numbers all serve to show that online shopping is now greatly popular among Vietnamese consumers and the ecommerce market size of Vietnam will keep increasing in the near future.

This conclusion is in line with the predictions made by internet giant Google and investment company Temasek Holdings in their report published last November. According to this report, the Vietnamese ecommerce market will grow by a rate of 43% by the year 2025, which will be the highest of the region.

Many exciting developments

With such a big potential, it comes as a no surprise that in 2018, Vietnamese ecommerce companies were able to acquire significant amount of foreign funding.

Right at the beginning of the year, Tiki received investment from JD.com in a round of Series C funding. The investment sees JD become one of the largest shareholders in Tiki. By September, the company continued to gain another 122 billion VND from VNG.

Meanwhile, within only the first 6 months of 2018, Shopee Vietnam already gained 1,200 billion VND in form of authorised capital from SEA, their Singaporean parent company.

To counter Shopee’s expansion in Southeast Asia, in March, Alibaba decided to invest another two billion USD into Lazada to improve the company’s competitiveness.

And last but not least, in 2018, Sendo.vn, the ecommerce subsidiary of FPT Corporations, also received a total of 51 million USD from the Japanese SBI Holdings and some other investors.

This constant stream of capital immediately brought about many interesting developments in the market.

For Tiki, after receiving the funding, they managed to make several remarkable progresses.  In particular, at the end of last quarter 3, iPrice noticed that Tiki’s average monthly web traffic had increased by an impressive 47.59% compared to the previous quarter. And by this November, they were the 2^nd highest in the country in terms of web traffic.

Similarly, Sendo.vn also improved a lot in 2018. During the Black Friday sales period, Sendo announced that they have reached 5 million orders within only one week, which is a new record for the merchant.

However, the title of the most formidable improvement of the year definitely belongs to Shopee Vietnam. The company began the year at the national 3^rd place in terms of web traffic, but only within 7 months, they already rose to the top of the chart. According to iPrice Group and SimilarWeb’s data, this marks the first time since quarter 2 of 2017 that the throne of highest ecommerce website traffic in Vietnam doesn’t belong to Lazada.

These huge funding along with the constant changes in rankings among the ecommerce companies show how determined they are at fighting for the domination in the ecommerce market in Vietnam. 2019 promised to be a very exciting year for Vietnamese ecommerce.

Source: iPrice Group