China, United States and United Kingdom account for more than 60% of the global e-commerce sales in the B2C channel. Chinese market is the biggest market in terms of volume and potential, while offering cutting edge marketing experiences to users thanks to its mobile first approach and tech Giants like Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu exploiting their big data advantages.

A struggle keeps heating in ASEAN markets, while retail and e-commerce giants increase their investments in the attempt to acquire advantages and gain key positions inside strategic markets for the immediate future. But some of the fastest growing markets are really interesting, as the latest figures available below are showing, pointing out impressive estimated CAGR values within 2022.

Source: Statista digital market outlook 2018 (here)

If we double check these values with some of the most interesting papers lately released, like the First Data report on local payments and cross border e-commerce, we can easily spot some key markets to look at while developing an effective marketing strategy. We tried to summarize at least two of them, less covered but not less interesting:

Indonesia: super-growth for one of the world’s most populous countries

E-commerce is growing steadily as the fourth most populous country in  the world, accounting in 2018 for more than 8 billion dollars (5 bln in pure retailing and 3 bln in social commerce). A revenue streams that mostly comes from offline sales shifting to online channels (70%) while the remaining share could be described as a stream of new purchases induced by e-commerce push. Lazada Indonesia, Tokopedia and Bukalapak generated more than 300 million clicks in 2018 accounting for more than 80% of the e-commerce traffic last year. High potential lies in the average online spend, still quite below the Asian average with aprox 230$ per user, and a category breakdown still sticked to the first wave of digital shopping: airline tickets and hotels, clothing and footwear, beauty products, generating 40% of the purchases.

Bukalapak is one of the largest e-commerce company in Southeast Asia with more than US$1 billion of valuation, founded in 2010 started as an online marketplace, but has since expanded to providing other services both for consumers and businesses, with a particular focus on small and medium-sized enterprises. In 2018 Bukalapak reached 50 million users and 500k daily transactions

South Africa: growing, growing, growing!

E-commerce users in South Africa reached 31.8 millions in 2018 and are expected to overcome the 40 millions milestone in the next two years, with a double-digit e-commerce sales growth until 2020, driven by fashion (+22%) and furniture and home products (+16%) pointing out a quite evolved market structure in terms of product category. By the way, the average revenue per user will stick to the 95/100 USD per user for the next five years, highlighting the neeed to carefully focus a proper marketing strategy and funnel leverage on specific purchasing groups and categories.

Jumia: a top African marketplace: started from electronics but has a quite wide catalogue with fashion products and more.  It has partnered with more than 50,000 local African companies and individuals, competing directly with some key regional players like Kilimall in Kenya and Konga in Nigeria, and owns the clothing retailer Zando in South Africa. Started in 2012 in Lagos, the company currently has a presence across 14 African countries. It has filed for approval from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to do an initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).  The public offering will give one of its largest shareholders, MTN the opportunity to sell about $600 million (R8.6 billion) in shares.

[Header Photo by frederik danko on Unsplash]