E-Commerce Trends Summary of E-commerce Status for 2022 and Predictions for 2023_part 1

The fast-changing global environment often alters people’s lives in modern society. Prime examples are COVID-19, the US-China conflict, and the Russia-Ukraine War. Since the world is connected, when a problem rises on one side, the problem spreads worldwide. Therefore, people have to sensitively respond to the movement of the global economy. In this context, I would like to summarize the e-commerce environment for 2022, predict the environment for 2023, and briefly seek countermeasures for global sellers. 1. E-commerce Status for 2022 1) Global Status
According to the e-commerce sales graph provided by Statista, 2021 saw record growth of 22.7% compared to 2020. However, the growth rate for 2022 was a mere 9.7% compared to that of 2021, showing the slowdown of the growth rate in the e-commerce sector.

This is because consumers returned to offline shopping due to the lifting of COVID-19 policies and various international circumstances occurred including inflation and war.
However, it is expected that this market with decreased growth will encounter a growth of 43% again by 2026 reaching about $8.1 trillion. The reason for focusing on this fact is because the total retail sales market is predicted to continuously grow and reach about twice the growth rate of 2020 in 2026^[02] despite the sluggish growth.

2) US Status
Then what about the e-commerce market of the US, the center of e-commerce worldwide?
According to the US Census Bureau News released by the US Department of Commerce, e-commerce in the US grew by 10.7% just in the third quarter of 2022 and by 6.2% in the fourth quarter of 2022.

Furthermore, according to the News, the e-commerce market in 2022 overall grew by approximately 7.7% compared to 2021, accounting for 14.6% of the total retail transactions. Considering the massive offline retail market, this is certainly not small.

Then, which online marketplace drove this growth in the US? According to data from eMarketer, Amazon’s market share was 37.8%, the highest in the market. In fact, the gap between the first and the second and third (Walmart 6.3%, Apple 3.9%) places was significant. Moreover, even if the market shares of 14 companies (2^nd to 15^th) were added, it was no match for Amazon’s market share.

The global brand value of Amazon was $705.65 billion in 2022, reaching the highest on record. This is a small increase compared to 2021, but it is an increase of a whopping 70% compared to 2020.^[05]

3) Southeast Asia
Now, let’s turn to the e-commerce market in Southeast Asia in 2022.
According to the WHO, the percentage of people who completed vaccination related to COVID-19 in Southeast Asia on August 2022 was as follows: Singapore 88%, Malaysia 85%, Vietnam 88%, Thailand 78%, the Philippines 68%, and Indonesia 63%. The figure was way higher than the global average of 65%.^[06] Therefore, it looks like Southeast Asians quickly returned to pre-pandemic lives.

The following graphs show how many times people in each country visited public gathering places including shopping centers, restaurants, cafés, theme parks, museums, libraries, and movie theaters during different periods. The outbreak of the pandemic was set at 0 in the graphs and looked at people worldwide. It can be said that people from major Southeast Asian countries quickly returned to their pre-pandemic lifestyles.

The growth of the e-commerce market in 2022 was predicted to be very sluggish and have negative growth. However, in reality, the e-commerce market showed a remarkable 15.5% growth just with the non-grocery e-commerce and was expected to grow 17% annually until 2025.

So, which marketplace assisted the e-commerce growth in Southeast Asia?
The answer is Shopee.
Shoppe is a marketplace where the headquarter SEA group is located in Singapore. It is a relative latecomer which started its service in 2015. However, it went through fast growth for several years, reaching a monthly average web session of 403 million in the second quarter of 2022. It beats Lazada and Indonesia’s largest market place Tokopedia that are active in the same 6 Southeast Asian countries. In the third quarter, Shopee marketplace processed 2 billion orders,^[09] placing itself as the number one marketplace in Southeast Asia.

Until now, the status of global e-commerce for 2022 and the e-commerce channel of each country have been covered. In the following content, the e-commerce trends of 2023 will be predicted, and the countermeasures of global sellers for these trends will be introduced.

# References [01] https://www.statista.com/statistics/379046/worldwide-retail-e-commerce-sales/
[02] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/global-retail-ecommerce-forecast-2023
[03] https://www.census.gov/retail/mrts/www/data/pdf/ec_current.pdf
[04] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274255/market-share-of-the-leading-retailers-in-us-e-commerce/
[05] https://www.statista.com/statistics/326086/amazon-brand-value/?locale=en
[06] https://covid19.who.int/table
[07] https://economysea.withgoogle.com/report/
[08] https://economysea.withgoogle.com/report/
[09] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1118061/shopee-number-of-orders/?locale=en
[10] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1348827/sea-leading-e-commerce-sites-by-monthly-web-sessions/?locale=en


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