A report of PwC showed that the most popular business models now in Vietnam re e-marketplace and e-retailers.
However, no enterprise is in the dominant position like Amazon in the US or Taobao in China. This can be the great opportunities for the newly arrived businesses to cement their high positions in the potential market.
According to PwC, the total value of the Vietnamese e-commerce market reached $300 million in 2011. Especially, the expected growth rates are very high, at 75 percent per annum in 2011-2015 which would allow the turnover to reach $2.8 billion by 2015.
Vietnam is a country with a young population who have the increasingly high income, possibly reaching $820 by 2015, and are willing to spend money on non-essential goods items.
It is expected that the number of Internet users would rise from 30 million in 2011 to 37 million by 2016, according to BMI. Meanwhile, the rapid development of high-speed Internet services would help Internet users more easily access online shopping services
The report of the Vietnam E-commerce Association (VECOM) showed the strong development of the ways of online transaction B2B and B2C. It also pointed out the higher efficiency in businesses’ email using. 83 percent of businesses got orders via emails, higher than the 70 percent in 2012.
Search engines and e-newspapers continued to be the tool used by most enterprises (43 percent and 40 percent, respectively).
Social networks have also been favored to advertise manufacturers’ and distributors’ websites, while the number of businesses using the tool (37 percent) is nearly equal to the percentage of businesses advertising on e-newspapers.
However, VECOM has noted that 15 percent of businesses still did not use any method to advertise their websites. 12 percent of enterprises join e-trading floors in 2013, of which 33 percent said this brought high efficiency.
According to Nguyen Dac Viet Dung, the owner of Sendo.vn, an e-trading floor, Vietnam has great potentials for the e-commerce development.
“We obtained the high growth rate of over 50 percent a month in the last two months,” Dung said.
“We deliver goods in 53 provinces and cities nationwide, which shows that shopping online has become a consumption habit of the Vietnamese,” he added.
The proverb “early bird can catch the worm” proves to be not absolutely true in the Vietnamese e-commerce market.
Vu Hai Nam, the business director of a web retailer, noted that it is the younger retailers who have great competitive edge in the market, because they can provide new experiences to the people who have got used to hunting for goods online.
He went on to say that new comers always bear the hard pressure because they have to compete with the elder web retailers. However, this allows them to avoid the mistakes the elder retailers once made.
Nam’s website, for example, follows a specific way to develop his business. The website only provides the products with the well known brands, with limited orders.
