The rapid rise in eCommerce across geographies especially in countries like Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam is experiencing rapid growth, with mobile usage and social media penetration being the highest worldwide.
Each country in the SEA region has varying levels of eCommerce penetration and the region’s potential is enormous. Customer behavior is very similar to that of China and Korea where K-pop idols create fashion trends.
SEA has approximately 400 million internet users and platforms such as Shopee, Lazada, and TikTok are leading the way providing customers with an immersive, interactive buying experience that combines social interaction with eCommerce capacity.
The e-commerce market is expected to grow by $234 billion by 2025, emphasizing the need to make data-driven decisions to navigate this battle swiftly.
Every eCommerce participant requires real-time access to actionable business intelligence to meet success metrics. Let’s understand the common types of eCommerce across geographies and the role of eCommerce analytics in striking first and fast in the race.
Common types of eCommerce
Each of these types serves a particular market need and varies based on the product or service offered to the target audience.
There are various common types of eCommerce such as:
- Quick Commerce – As the name itself suggests rapid delivery of goods often within minutes or a couple of hours. It focuses on near-instant delivery of groceries, and convenience items such as household necessities. Example – Blinkit, Zepto, and GoPuff are q-commerce platforms that offer quick delivery within (10-30 minutes).
- QSR Commerce– That is Quick Service restaurants serve rapid, efficient, with affordable price cuisines. Customers also can dine in, take out, or have delivery at their place. Example – McDonald’s serves millions of consumers daily as it is a global QSR business. According to Statista, the worldwide QSR industry is expected to reach $1.2 trillion by 2028.
- Social Commerce- It is an integration of the shopping experience into social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and others. Social commerce across social media platforms is more effective as it’s not dependent on traffic coming from searches instead consumers are already engaged on the platforms.
- Marketplace Commerce – The purchase and sale of products via online marketplaces where various suppliers offer goods. The marketplace concept is gaining traction, especially in developing countries. Example– 3rd party merchants can list their products on platforms such as Amazon, eBay, and Flipkart providing buyers with a wide range of options.
The FMCG category in marketplace commerce is expected to be the fastest growing with a total market of $375.1 billion by 2025.
Are your products the top drawers? on the above-mentioned common commerce types?
If not, then there is a great need for e-commerce analytics to be incorporated into your brand.
Need for eCommerce Analysis for brands
Visibility is an important component of eCommerce business and digital shelf analytics can help with that. Monitoring a brand’s digital shelf performance such as product availability, pricing, and search rankings allows marketers to ensure that their items are easily accessible and competitive consistently across several eCommerce platforms.
- Sales Growth
- Improved Visibility
- Increased conversion rates
- Enhanced Customer Experience
- Competitors Insights
Metrics for Customer Journey Optimizations
It is important to consider the various analytical metrics while forming a strategy to sell on various eCommerce platforms. Customers’ journey is optimized at broader three levels such as:
1.Awareness and interest – It helps brands to track visibility and ensures that the product is accurately featured throughout the marketplace boosting awareness and driving interest from potential customers.
It consists
- Discoverability tool
- Competitor analysis banner analysis
- Content recommendation
2.Consideration & Evaluation –The system evaluates critical elements such as bestseller analysis to track the ranking of the products and the factors behind top sellers.
- Pricing and Discounting analysis
- Content Analyzer
- Customer feedback analysis gathers ratings and reviews, and Q&A data to assess customer sentiments.
- SKU health analysis scores based on content quality, availability discoverability.
- Delivery TAT
3.Decision / Purchase – Overseas digital shelf performance by sales analysis with scorecards at brand & category level boosts bestselling products and hero products of the brand.
How eCommerce analytics helps businesses to grow – Case Analysis
Let’s understand this with a case study, a leading FMCG brand was battling to ensure consistent product availability across key geographies.
Challenges faced by the brand
Their product presence fell behind competitors, resulting in missed sales opportunities and a reduced market position both online and offline. The brand’s principal problem was to ensure product availability in numerous regions.
Recognizing the severity of the situation the brand relied on eCommerce analytics intelligence solution mScanIt for actional information.
Solution
Using the eCommerce analytics tool mScanIt through targeted inventory optimization, data-driven insights, and competitor benchmarking gained detailed product availability data from a variety of online sources. Determined which places their product was underperforming in.
Also, identifying the availability against the rivals and areas for improvement in with real-time insights to change online and offline inventory levels ensuring that products are available in the appropriate locations.
Outcome
The brand was able to close the gap against the competitors and was able to overtake a competitor by increasing its availability by 29%.
Fig 1.0 Analyzing the data on availability for the past year Aug 23 – Aug 24
The analytics and solution enabled the brand to not only improve its sales online but also offline too. The case study demonstrates the power of AI-ML data-driven decision–making in enhancing both online and offline retail performance.
To sum up
Switching to e-commerce analytics can help eliminate friction in the shopping process and make it easier for customers to complete their journey of purchase, and to edge ahead of their competitors across the digital commerce ecosystem. Business intelligence must be granular to the last detail and scalable across geography and platforms.
Get in touch to learn more about E-commerce Analytics.
