Mobile commerce to lead growth in 2018
KUALA LUMPUR: Mobile commerce will fuel growth this year, highlighted Pay88 Holding Sdn Bhd (iPay88), an NTT Data company and a Malaysianbased leading provider of online payment service solutions in Asean following an analysis of its 2017 data insights.
As a dominant market player of Malaysia’s online payment system transactions, iPay88’s annual findings give a good representation of the country’s eCommerce space, as well as the direction that online payments and shoppers are trending towards.
Over the past 12 months of 2017, iPay88 recorded a total of 58.5 million online transactions moving over its payment gateway systems, increasing by 53.1 per cent from 2016.
Of these 58.5 million transactions performed via its online payment gateways, the festive season month of December was the popular month with over 6.7 million transactions recorded.
Meanwhile, the total sales of the 2017 online transactions amounted to a whopping RM6.6 billion, more than double from RM3.0 billion in 2016.
Executive director of iPay88, Chan Kok Long drew attention to the ever-consistent growth of mobility as indicated by the increasing number of mobile transactions in Malaysia.
“In January 2017, we recorded a little less than 2.0 million mobile-type online payments. Moving onward to December 2017, in that month alone, this number shot up to 3.5 million mobile online transactions,” he said in a statement yesterday.
Meanwhile, iPay88’s data statistics show that desktopbased online transactions are stagnating at a constant fluctuation between 0.8 to 1.2 million per month, in 2017.
“Earlier last year in 2017, iPay88 expected that online banking would continue as the preferred method of eCommerce purchases on the back of rising purchasing power of the Malaysian consumers as well as rapidly expanding smartphone penetration across the country.
“This year, the driver for mCommerce will be the trend of more creative mobile applications being launched for the online shopper, that combine location services + retail customer intelligence + payment solutions + social media experience,” Chan said.
More shoppers are now accessing the shopping sites using a mobile than a desktop. iPay88 statistics show that the trend of mCommerce has been changing since 2015. In Q1 2015, desktop transactions doubled mobile transactions. Subsequently in 1Q16, mobile transactions were on par with desktop transactions.
“Mobile eCommerce became prevalent since 2Q16, started overtaking desktop eCommerce. Our system saw a significant record high of 9.3 million internet traffic from mobile shoppers in 4Q17, three times of the desktop traffic,” Chan added.
Smartphone penetration is still on a rising wave in Malaysia. According to a 2017 report by comScore, Malaysian digital users between the ages of 15 to 24 mostly accessed the Internet via mobile only, while those from 24 to 35 were multi-platform (desktop and mobile).
In year 2018, Chan expects stiff competition for conventional retail companies that have not invested in digital versions for their retail channels.
“Meanwhile, online shops will continue to thrive and even more as they participate in marketplace initiatives such as the PIKOM-organised #MYCYBERSALE 2017 that generated a total of RM311 million in total sales in just five days,” he shares.
An interesting highlight from the observation of iPay88’s data insights is the obvious preference of online banking over credit cards for online payments.
Between the months of January to December 2017, credit cards accounted for between 1.3 to 2.4 million online payments each month. In comparison, there were between 2.5 to 4.4 million online banking payments each month.
From this, clearly online banking is the preferred choice of online payment.
“It is not to say that credit cards are becoming obsolete for online payment and shopping in Malaysia. However, the choice of online banking is more attractive now and it is also generally positive because it advocates the habit of spending what you have in the bank, rather than buying on credit,” he ended.