Visit my new blog for updated post on e-commerce statistics

The last time I wrote about e-commerce statistics in Malaysia was 2-3 years back, which you can read it here. It's time to get some updated figures, thanks to PayPal's "Online and Mobile Shopping Insights" study.

Malaysia's online shopping market size was RM 1.8 billion in 2010, estimated to be RM 5 billion in 2014. It's safe to predict that our e-commerce market size is around RM 2-3 billion for this year.



70% of the total online shopping spend came from the middle income and above groups (RM 4,000 and above).

Out of the RM 1.8 billion, RM 825 million or more was spent on local websites, local merchants.



As expected, travel (airline tickets etc.) still leads in terms of products / services bought online. This time around, bill payment is finally included at second place.



Some interesting facts whether shopping is done on local or overseas websites:

- Malaysians purchased nearly 2.5 times as much airline tickets from local websites (RM 173 million) compared to overseas websites (RM 72 million).

- Financial products / services (RM 78 million) and health / beauty products (RM 29 million) are mainly purchased on local websites.

- Online purchases for clothings / shoes / accessories are slightly more on local websites (RM 48 million) compared to overseas websites (RM 41 million).

- Nearly twice as much spent online for books on overseas websites (RM 63 million) compared to local websites (RM 36 million).

- Nearly twice as much is spent online for movie / music / game downloads on overseas websites (RM 51 million) compared to local websites (RM 27 million).

- Malaysians' favourite countries for overseas online shopping were the US, Singapore, UK, China and Hong Kong.

Mobile Commerce

While m-commerce still in its early stage,  RM 100 million (approximately 6% of the online shopping market value) is being spent via mobile devices, in 2010.

As you can see from the chart below, buying physical products via mobile devices hasn't hit mainstream yet.



Visit my new blog for updated post on e-commerce statistics

Statistics sourced from PayPal's "Online and Mobile Shopping Insights" study.