A report on Vietnam’s e-commerce market in the third quarter was conducted independently by Metric based based on official figures collected from the five e-commerce platforms, including Shopee, Lazada, SenDo, TikTok Shop and Tiki.

The total revenue of the Vietnam’s e-commerce market reached VND63 trillion in the third quarter 2023 with 443 stalls having orders and 602 million product units successfully delivered.

The figure demonstrated a 54.42 percent increase compared with the same period 2022. Of the e-commerce platforms, TikTok Shop caught special attention from the public with its rapid expansion. Its market share jumped from 3 percent in the third quarter 2022 (the same as Tiki’s) to 16 percent in the third quarter in 2023.

Meanwhile, Shopee saw its market share slightly decrease from 72 percent to 69 percent, and Lazada from 21 to 14 percent.

However, compared with the second quarter this year, Shopee was the only platform which obtained growth (from 63 percent to 69 percent, with VND43.713 trillion). 

Meanwhile, Lazada’s market share dropped from 18 to 14 percent (VND8.768 trillion), TikTok Shop from 18 to 16 percent (VND10.122 trillion), while Tiki made no headway with just one percent (VND599 billion) and SenDo VND29 billion.

However, in general, the third quarter witnessed outstanding revenue growth of the top five e-commerce platforms, at 22.66 percent, a very encouraging result in the context of current upheavals.

The report also pointed out that in the first nine months of the year, the total revenue of the Vietnam’s e-commerce market reached VND163 trillion, which means that the nine-month revenue was higher than the revenue of the whole year of 2022 (7 percent, or VND10 trillion). The high revenue of VND25 trillion from TikTok Shop made a contribution to the growth.

Notably, in the first nine months of 2022, TikTok Shop was not present in the market. If calculating the revenue of the platforms Shopee, Lazada, Tiki and Sendo, the growth rate over the same period would be 33 percent.

Beauty products and services brought the highest revenue (VND8.69 trillion), leaving other business fields far behind.

In the third quarter in 2023, the number of sellers decreased by 12 percent, which meant 49,500 stalls stopped operation on the platforms. This was attributed to economic difficulties, which forced consumers to tighten their purse strings, and to changing policies.

However, observers said sellers should blame themselves for the bad business performance. They lacked effective business strategies, did not survey the market thoroughly before making investments, and their operation costs were not controlled well.

Van Anh