2013 was a year of booming e-commerce in Thailand. Thanks to more3G coverage , the 131 percent mobile penetration rate, and about 52 million internet users in the country, more people than ever shopped online. In fact, the Thai E-Commerce Association expects that e-shopping and online businesses will have grown by 30 percent this year, up from THB 119.64 billion ($3.65 billion) spent in 2012.
In Thailand, this boom was boosted by newer kinds of e-commerce, things that have evolved from more established channels such as general e-stores and consumer-to-consumer selling via forums. Here are four emerging social e-commerce trends we’ve seen in Thailand in 2013.
F-commerce
Now that Thailand has 24 million Facebook users , it’s only natural that people are taking advantage of the crowded social network for things other than sharing. This trend is ‘Facebook commerce’, or f-commerce for short. In Thailand, f-commerce sellers often focus on women’s products, ranging from accessories to clothes, skincare products to make-up. However, merely creating a page to sell something is so 2012; in 2013, merchants actually started using promoted posts and other types of Facebook advertising. This made the business a lot more social.
This new trend – across Asia as a whole, not just Thailand – was also a chance for startups to offer services to these sellers. And so we saw things like Page365, Instapps, and Bentoweb emerge as services dedicated to building solutions for Facebook vendors in this region. Those all offers an analytics dashboard for sellers to monitor their customers’ behavior, product requests, purchases, and view how items are being shared socially within Facebook.
Source: TECHINASIA
