Not only does South Korea have Asia’s third biggest E-Commerce market, it is also one of the most progressive online retail markets both in Asia and worldwide. According to information from the yStats.com report, E-Commerce sales already made up nearly 20% of total retail sales in 2016 due to factors such as a developed Internet infrastructure and having the highest Internet penetration rate in the region. Over half of Internet users purchased products online and among them, 2 in 3 made monthly purchases.
Globally, the most popular categories of items purchased online consisted of travel, clothes and electronics and South Korea also followed suit in 2016. The online purchasing of groceries in South Korea is an outlier, underlines the yStats.com report. FMCG purchases completed online made up a double-digit share of retail sales in this category in 2016, whereas other more mature markets like the USA, the UK, and France had only single-digit shares. More than half of online grocery sales came from M-Commerce.
The degree of M-Commerce use is nearly unprecedented in South Korea, reveals the yStats.com report. Over half of online retail sales in South Korea came from mobile last year. Convenience is a major driver of M-Commerce, with smartphones ranking both as the most preferred device for online shopping and being used more frequently than computers.
M-Commerce has double the growth rate of total online retail sales, thus market players are becoming more accommodating to the field of mobile. Popular shopping apps like 11Street and Coupang both had a seven-digit number of users, but the leading player, Ebay Korea, still holds the largest market share of sales.
For further information, see: https://www.ystats.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017.06.07_Product-Brochure-Order-Form_South-Korea-B2C-E-Commerce-Market-2017.pdf