Electronic commerce transaction is growing faster in the Philippines this year as consumers shift toward online shopping amid the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, according to industry players.
“E-commerce activity has been rapidly accelerating and surpassing projections ever since the pandemic started,” said Martin Yu, associate director of Shopee Philippine in the webinar “Challenges and opportunities: changes in e-commerce business behaviur in the post COVID-19 era” which was organized by Ninja Van Philippines in partnership with GCash and Shopee Philippines.
“At Shopee, we harness this growth through ramping up seller education initiatives to ensure that MSMEs are equipped with the tools to grow their businesses,” he said.
A leading e-commerce platform, Shopee serves 18,000 brands. To boost seller education, Shopee offers three services such as Seller Support Package, Seller Center and Shopee University where sellers can find in-depth information on different ways to help businesses grow.
Frederic Levy, chief commercial officer of GCash said the company saw their transactions increase by up to 1,000 percent for their relevant services, putting them on track to hit P1 trillion in annual gross value.
Levy said the latter figure would surpass the combined values from the past three years.
“A significantly large number of people are clearly using GCash especially from an MSME perspective—to help receive cashless payments which are more convenient and safe during this pandemic,” Levy said.
Martin Cu, country head of Ninja Van Philippines, said “the biggest opportunity we’ve seen at Ninja Van Philippines is to serve a fast-growing client base.”
“We’ve witnessed twice as many sign-ups from micro and small online businesses during the course of the pandemic,” he said.
Ninja Van Philippines, a tech-enabled express logistics company, has launched two services directed at online sellers looking to boost their business operations.
As cash flow proved to be one of the main struggles of e-commerce players during the pandemic, Ninja Van launched COD Advance, which allows businesses to receive their cash-on-delivery payments on the next working day.
Ninja Van Philippines also introduced Ninja Direct, a platform that allows online sellers to source products from different countries.
