by NUR HAZIQAH A MALEK/ pic credit: rage.com.my

THE continuous collaboration between e-commerce players and partners in the country has helped ShopBack Malaysia to record growth in gross merchandise value (GMV) during the first half of 2019 (1H19).

Its co-founder Sharmeen Looi (picture) said the e-commerce market has matured following the efforts by its partners in enhancing their services to allow for seamless transactions.

“I know that we had some payment issues last year, but it is a lot smoother this year. I think the collective efforts and enhancement from the partners have definitely helped grow the e-commerce ecosystem as a whole.

“This has also contributed to our growth (as a reward platform),” she said at a media briefing in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.

ShopBack Malaysia country GM Eddy Han said the company’s GMV grew 77% in 1H19 compared to 22% recorded in 2H18.

“Given the positive outlook and strong online shopping interest among local shoppers, we are confident that 2H19 will grow even better with the launch of our ShopFest,” he said.

Han added that in terms of expenditure ranking, Malaysia is among the top contributing countries that the reward platform is operating in.

“One of the factors is that Malaysia is the first country we have launched into after Singapore.

“There have also been a lot of experiments that we have done during the past four years of operations here,” he said.

Han said the growth posted in 1H19 was also attributed to more information gathered to work around consumers’ behaviour towards shopping.

“One of the things we did differently this year was by listening to them which contributed a lot to the feedback that we needed, thus creating a large traction to our application,” he said.

Yesterday, ShopBack launched its Shopfest online shopping festival with the aim to give away as many as 1.5 million of vouchers with over RM20 million cashback via its reward platform.

The ongoing festival is taking place throughout the 2H19 encompassing the 9.9, #MYCYBERSALE, 11.11, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, 12.12 and Christmas and New Year Sales.

Prior to the launch, ShopBack had conducted an online shopping sentiment survey and found that 90% of its shoppers intend to make a purchase during the year-end online sales.

Han said most of the shoppers have already made their decisions on what to purchase online.

“About 64% of them have already know what they want, while 17.8% shop with the product category in mind,” he said, adding that 13.7% of the shoppers would only browse for what is available.

Han said the items that most customers plan to purchase fall under fashion, beauty and supplements, as well as home and living categories.

The survey revealed that 40% of our respondents are willing to spend between RM51 to RM150, while 32% would settle for between RM151 to RM500. Only 18% are willing to spend less than RM50, he added.

Meanwhile, Looi said changes will also be made to the ShopBack application to accommodate for the Shopfest experience. We will add a dedicated inbox which would improve deliverability of notifications, display deals and content review to show which deal that the shoppers receive the cashback money from, she said.

The region saw 10 million trans- actions were made at e-commerce marketplaces such as Lazada and Shopee, while one million pieces of fashion apparel and accessories were sold during the previous edition.