Brands And Retailers In Asia Pacific Struggling To Bring E-commerce Offerings To Market Quickly

Complexity and service provider fragmentation significant barriers to taking businesses online
By: Asia Pacific Digital
 
TANJONG PAGAR, Singapore - May 22, 2013 - PRLog -- (SINGAPORE) -- May 22, 2013 – eCommerce in Asia Pacific is growing at a fast pace and by the end of 2013 is expected to overtake North America as the region with the world’s highest B2C eCommerce revenues[1]. Despite this positive backdrop, brands and retailers face a high level of complexity and many barriers to success when establishing B2C eCommerce offerings in the region.

“In eCommerce, speed to market is everything,” says Roger Sharp, Chairman of Asia Pacific Digital (http://www.asiapacificdigital.com/). “While selling B2C presents an enormous opportunity for brands and retailers, the diversity of our region, combined with a highly fragmented service provider ecosystem, makes it very difficult to get an eCommerce offering to market quickly. Retailers and brands are finding that when they eventually get to market, someone has already beaten them to the draw. Your competition is no longer local, it’s global, and it’s no longer your traditional competitor.”

Over the past four years, Asia Pacific Digital has been building a scale eCommerce services group across the region. Headquartered in Singapore and with 14 offices across Asia Pacific, over 750 employees provide brands and retailers with an end-to-end eCommerce solution capable of reaching over half a billion consumers in China, South East Asia and Australasia.

Sean Toohey, Group Head of eCommerce for Asia Pacific Digital, says, “We regularly see retailers and brands taking 12 to 18 months to launch their online platforms. Many find that when they launch, all they have really done is build a shiny piece of technology with some nice creative, but without clear visibility on how they are going to make money online. So 18 months into the process, we find many brands are not successful online; some claim that eCommerce doesn’t work for them, but it is their approach towards eCommerce that is often wrong."

A daunting challenge facing retailers and brands from operating in the Asia Pacific region is how to segment and enter the regional markets. Given that Asia Pacific is not a single region but 13 or 14 vastly different marketplaces, brands need to develop a detailed understanding and look at developing a unifying online presence catering to different infrastructure hurdles, digital adoption barriers, stages of economic development, opaque points of market entry, language and cultural barriers, and so on, in each market.

In a recent study by yStats[2], Asian eCommerce sales are projected to account for over a third of global B2C eCommerce revenues in 2013. In Singapore, there has been an explosion in the demand for digital goods, with revenues for the Singaporean online commerce market forecasted to reach S$4.4 billion by 2015[3].

As part of Asia Pacific Digital’s launch, the company has sponsored ultra-marathon runner Tom Denniss (http://www.tomsnextstep.com/) on his mission to run around the world, raising money for Oxfam. Moreover, Tom is on track to break the Guinness record for Fastest Circumnavigation of the Earth on Foot. Tom has been running more than 50km daily since December 2011 and will be running through Malaysia and Singapore on 22 May and 30 May respectively, to coincide with the group’s formal launch in South East Asia.  

Next Digital (http://www.asiapacificdigital.com/companies/next-digital....), a subsidiary of Asia Pacific Digital, has built the technology that powers Tom’s run, tracks him and enables him to blog and report from almost any location. You can track Tom’s journey here: www.tomsnextstep.com

About Asia Pacific Digital (http://www.asiapacificdigital.com/about-us.aspx):

Asia Pacific Digital is powering digital commerce in China, South East Asia and Australasia through its Next Digital, dgm, Empowered, Jericho, SMART and Interface IT business units. Our brands specialise in three areas - Strategies and Solutions, Customer Acquisition and Customer Management. We're proudly independent and we're financially strong. With 750+ team members in eight countries throughout Asia Pacific, we serve the needs of more than 1,000 local, regional and global clients.

Our mission is simple: to help our clients grow.

For more information, visit: www.asiapacificdigital.com

[1] yStats Research April 2013: http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/pdxxk6/global_

[2] yStats Research April 2013: http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/pdxxk6/global_

[3] PayPal research 2011: http://www.techinasia.com/the-stats-and-facts-of-online-shopping-in-singapore/
End
Source:Asia Pacific Digital
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Tags:Ecommerce, Retail, Technology, B2c, Asia Pacific Digital
Industry:Technology, Internet
Location:Tanjong Pagar - Singapore - Singapore
Subject:Companies
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