More than 2,000 people attended the two workshops on global sale co-organized by Amazon and the Vietnam E-commerce Association (Vecom) in HCMC and Hanoi in late September.

Since March 2018, Amazon has been taking a lot of moves to approach Vietnamese suppliers by joining forces with Vecom to organize training courses and workshops. 

More recently, Amazon Global Selling launched its official website and Facebook in Vietnamese language, aiming to remove the language barrier for Vietnamese individuals and small businesses who want to sell goods on Amazon.

Amazon Global Selling’s director for Southeast Asia and South Korea Park Joonmo said Amazon can see more sellers from Vietnam, including manufacturers, brand owners and startups. They begin selling goods to all over the globe and want to access millions of potential customers in the world through Amazon’s international markets.

Vietnamese once felt a nice surprise when seeing their familiar products such as tiger balm and coffee filters available on Amazon and attracted buyers. However, according to MOIT, only 200 Vietnamese businesses put their products on sale on Amazon. The figure remains very modest if noting that Vietnam has numerous advantageous products, from farm produce, food to wooden furniture

“Sellers just need to send products to our FBAs (fulfillment by Amazon). The other works, including receiving goods, packaging, transporting and delivering to customers all over the world will be undertaken by us,” Joonmo said, adding that the only thing sellers have to do is providing attractive products.

Alibaba, the giant from China, has also joined the race to develop the Vietnamese market. After a period of looking for the suppliers for B2B e-commerce floor, Alibaba has begun seeking Vietnamese sellers for B2C website – AliExpress - since July.

Commenting about Vietnam market, Yang Ninh, the representative of AliExpress, said this is a wonderful destination point with attractive growth rate annually, one of the most diversified production center in the world.

Declining to give exact figure, but Tran Dinh Toan, deputy CEO of OSB, the partner of Alibaba which helps connect manufacturers in Vietnam, said thousands of Vietnamese enterprises have exported products via Alibaba’s B2B platform over the last decade.

Amazon and Alibaba take the moves in the context of export playing an increasingly important role in the national economy. According to GDC, the total export turnover reached $214.02 billion in 2017, an increase of 21.2 percent over 2016.

Cross-border e-commerce has become an important channel for exporters to sell their products. A report says 32 percent of SMEs have established business relations with foreign partners via online channels.

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