The idea is dead simple, before you can buy something online, the products (SKUs), have to be available online first. If it isn't online, it can never be discovered, then of course consumers won't be able to hunt it down and buy it online.
The idea is dead simple, before you can buy something online, the products (SKUs), have to be available online first. If it isn't online, it can never be discovered, then of course consumers won't be able to hunt it down and buy it online.
That's why Products Availability Online (PAO) - PAO is a good health indicator on where the e-commerce market of a particular country is heading. Let's take a quick look on PAO of leading online marketplaces in selected countries.
800 Million SKUs on Taobao.com - China's #1 C2C Marketplace (source)
500 Million SKUs on Ebay (source)
218 million SKUs on Amazon.com (source)
52 Million SKUs on Ruten - Taiwan #1 C2C Marketplace (source)
40 Million SKUs on 11st.co.kr - Korea's #2 C2C Marketplace
770,000 SKUs on Tokopedia - Indonesia Marketplace (source)
So, how about Malaysia? Let's take a look at the local online marketplace king - Lelong.my, and the king of online classified - Mudah.my.
640,000 SKUs on Lelong.my (source)
624,000 SKUs on Mudah.my
(rough breakdown as of April 2014)
To grow Malaysia eCommerce industry, one of the key metrics is to grow the number of SKUs online. With online sales a measly 1% of our total retail size now, there's plenty of room for growth! You wouldn't want to miss our summary earlier on The Ultimate Guide to E-Commerce Statistics of Southeast Asia & Malaysia.
Notes:
1) These SKUs are not unique, not repeated SKUs count, in actual it could be lesser.
2) Product Availability Online doesn't mean that the stock is available too. Read For E-commerce Business, Stock Management still Holds the Key to Success.
3) For Lelong's SKUs count, we excluded 2 categories, namely "House & Property" and "Rental, To Let and For Hire".
4) Mudah.my is an online classified site, but it is leading in terms of traffic, thus a good benchmark to understand about PAO. Again, we excluded a few categories, namely vehicles (cars and motorcycles), jobs, property, travels, item for swap etc.
Read also: Marketplace battle: The products offering
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