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Automate your WhatsApp marketing
Connect your chat apps in a shared inbox
Multiple chat apps on one website widget
Drive sales to your Shopify store
Drive sales to your EasyStore site
Content Writer
E-commerce is an ever-changing, ever-evolving business space. In fact, Malaysia’s e-commerce landscape is growing rapidly every year, with an annual growth rate of about 24%.
Staying ahead of your competition is becoming harder and harder each day as new businesses pop up and advanced processes kick in.
While new trends keep coming up each year, many others that you might be used to keep advancing. So it is important to be on the lookout for what’s new as well as for ways to use your old insights.
To help you stay updated, we share 10 e-commerce trends in Malaysia in 2022 so you can stay on top of the game and continue driving traffic to your e-commerce business!
Chatbots have been widely adopted by several e-commerce brands in Malaysia and all around the world. It is expected that their market size will reach 1.25 billion U.S. dollars by 2025.
While many businesses seek to integrate these chatbots into their e-commerce platforms, many others who already have them seek to optimize to serve their consumers accurately.
It’s a trend that’s becoming impossible to ignore to help in streamlining customer support and improving the overall shopping experience.
Here are some ways you can integrate chatbots into your business:
Mobile e-commerce is one of the major e-commerce trends in Malaysia that you simply cannot ignore. The total percentage of mobile commerce share of all retail sales is increasing more and more each year.
Driven by a 63.9% penetration rate for smartphones, J.P. Morgan reports that the annual growth rate for mobile shopping is approximately 31%, and is expected to reach a value of 7.35 billion U.S. dollars.
To add to that, about 58% of Malaysian internet users engage in mobile commerce activities.
Mobile marketing is now getting a hit that many retailers swear that it’s booming. From SMS marketing to pay-per-click advertising, businesses find it easier to connect with customers without breaking their banks.
To leverage the m-commerce trend, you can:
Just like how m-commerce is on the rise, social commerce isn’t lagging behind either. With more customers owning a smartphone, this has led to a spike in social media commerce, especially through platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.
Many businesses thus turn to such platforms to not only complete transactions through chat messaging, but also to market their business to drive more sales.
For example, many businesses use WhatsApp to market their business by sending broadcast messages, notifications, and even abandoned cart recovery reminders.
With the increasing need for personalized e-commerce experiences, many businesses use artificial intelligence (AI) to tailor their products to their ideal customers automatically.
Customer segmentation, buying behaviors, and personalized product recommendations are now possible and easy with AI. The more the volume of data that AI collects, the more it becomes accurate and human-like.
When you convey exactly what your customers are looking for, it becomes increasingly easy to make more sales while keeping the lights of your business on. So, you should not be left out of this trend this year.
Finding and following prospects wherever they are and giving them the ability to make purchases without moving from one platform is a widely adopted trend in Malaysia.
It’s more about the concept of omnipresence in selling and customer support. While shoppers may hop from one media platform to another, it is crucial to be available on different platforms.
From social media platforms to e-commerce marketplaces, being easily accessible on multiple platforms will ensure efficient marketing that lets you survive in this age of competitiveness.
New marketing solutions that provide unified management capabilities with tools like a multichannel widget and a centralized inbox can let you manage all your channels and customer service within a single platform.
It is no surprise that content marketing is still among the old marketing trends retailers are still capitalizing on in 2022.
The need to educate your audience and share valuable insights about their problems remains the easiest touch-points that leads to profitable customer action.
It’s no wonder most notable e-commerce platforms like EasyStore and Shopify offer a plethora of educational content and help centers to share more valuable insights with their customers.
Moreso, it is a more effective marketing strategy for businesses to attract thousands of customers who are pre-qualified by the topics that you share. They can see you as an industry expert and easily convert them into customers when they interact with your marketing tools on your website like chatbots.
Content marketing is not limited only to blog posts, as you can vary your content with images, videos, and downloadable resources that are unique and interesting. For example, including video reviews in an e-commerce platform can influence over 67% of consumers to purchase a product from your store.
Customers like to feel valued by brands they choose to do business with, and more e-commerce retailers are now leveraging this need to boost their sales.
More and more e-commerce businesses are introducing loyalty programs to encourage their customers to come back again and again.
Repeat business ultimately leads to more profits, and so, if possible, you should not ignore it in your company. Rewards like discounts, next-purchase coupons, and cashback can significantly increase your sales performance.
Loyalty programs can improve customer retention, relationship, and satisfaction while increasing sales and providing valuable consumer data.
With bank transfers and digital payments accounting for a whopping 93% of e-commerce transactions in Malaysia, it’s essential to offer multiple digital payment methods. Having a variety of digital payment methods can further encourage customers to purchase from you.
In fact, not having enough payment options is one of the many reasons why online shoppers abandon their carts.
In Malaysia, bank transfers dominate the primary e-commerce payment method, which accounts for 46% of all transactions. The rising adoption of smartphones has also paved the way for digital wallets (or dompet digital), which is the fourth most popular payment option.
Furthermore, the Malaysian central bank has issued 10 new electronic money (e-money) licenses to non-banks in 2018, bringing the total to 47 issuers. This means that shoppers can soon start paying through ShopeePay and Alipay.
Allowing customers to choose a preferred digital payment option and allowing them to save their information will ensure faster checkouts, thus more repeat businesses.
Long ago, few people used or even knew about the possibilities of using voice and visual search to find solutions for what they needed.
With visual search, consumers no longer need to think so hard to find the adjectives that express the products they want to buy. Nor do they need to type long text descriptions when they could search by voice.
With Google’s Multitask Unified Model algorithm (MUM), photo apps like Camfinder, and intelligent app cameras like the one for Pinterest, a shopper can snap a photo of the product they want to buy.
These examples and many other advancements in technology provide capabilities for the visual search that’s recently gaining massive adaptation in e-commerce from all over the globe.
Visual search is particularly useful if the customer doesn’t know the name or category of the product they want.
With voice assistants, e-commerce shoppers can hit the voice button, and the assistant will allow them to shop and order products while reducing the need for typing.
Your business can utilize these new e-commerce trends as visual and voice product searches become more seamless. Thus, tailor your online store to enable these features or leverage them from other providers.
Cross-border spending accounts for 44% of all Malaysian e-commerce sales, with 48% of Malaysian shoppers having already purchased from overseas.
China, the US, and Singapore accounted for about 60% of international parcels in Malaysia. China is also the biggest overseas shopping market for Malaysian shoppers because of a better e-commerce shopping experience, social commerce options, and a wider range of products.
Retail giants such as Alibaba, Lazada, and Shopee are also capitalizing on the opportunities presented in Malaysia.
The willingness to spend internationally is a good sign for the e-commerce market in Malaysia, but what does this mean for you?
If you’re a retailer outside of Malaysia and want to expand into the peninsula, you should improve your service levels and ensure that your logistics providers align with customer expectations. If needed, invest in distribution hubs to set up domestic last-mile delivery operations. This allows for a swift and efficient flow of cross-border goods to the Malaysian market.
If you’re a Malaysian e-commerce business, you’d want to expand your reach to markets like China and Singapore (if you haven’t already done so), and network with various international partners to ease the burden of cross-border fulfillment.
Getting ahead of others when you have everything you need is not very hard, but knowing where to source the valuable insights to keep yourself on top is tougher.
Here are 5 sources of information that can help you stay on top of what’s happening.
Following blogs and publications of influencers and experts in your industry is a wiser action when finding newer trends to adopt in your business.
Therefore, look for experts and influencers in your industry who share topics closely related to your niche and those from other industries to give you a bird’s eye into what’s new and working.
Customer feedback is an extremely valuable way of staying on the ball with upcoming trends. Customers know more about what they want and how they can get it from different businesses. You’ll be surprised at what they know if you ask them to share their ideas on what’s trending in your industry.
The key here is to maintain good customer relationships, and as you build more connections, they will be more willing to open up and share with you what they know.
If you have the budget for it, offering incentives for customers to leave feedback is another great way to get them to share more insights with you.
Keeping an eye on your competitors is always a good benchmarking strategy to keep yourself updated. While you shouldn’t blindly follow everything that your competitors are doing, you should check on them to see what’s working and what’s not.
Check if they recently jumped into a new trend that you’ve been afraid to try out. See if it works out and if you should also try.
Reports from news and research sites let you access relevant insights into customer data that can significantly grow your business further.
Keeping an eye on up-to-date and original data can help you know where any aspect of your business is heading. You can learn about the trends that your competitors are trying and if they are finding success with them.
Data banks like Statista and Google Trends are great portals that offer insightful market data that can tell you all you need to know about upcoming trends.
Analyzing the value of an activity or tool in your own business can open up endless possibilities on what’s working and what’s not. Finding success with your tools and action plans can be the next pieces of insights that can turn into a trend quickly.
Getting your e-commerce store up and running successfully is becoming more challenging because of stiff competition that shows no signs of slowing. That’s why even minor changes can cause massive success or failure.
Therefore, to compete and find more success in online retail sales, adopt these trends before your competitors take the lead!
It’s also important to monitor industry experts, customers’ opinions, competitors, and news of new technologies that can revolutionize your business.
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