E-commerce as a Fastest Growing Technology in the World
With an increasing demand for online purchasing, more and more customers are searching for goods to buy online, from the comfort of their home. We can say that e-commerce is expanding tremendously because of its complete range of benefits that any industry can enjoy.
One of our speakers, Koba Kurdadze, founder and CEO of UniPAY in Georgia talked exactly about e-commerce in emerging markets at Touch Digital Summit 2019 and what impact does e-commerce have on modern technology.
Day by day, we are part of e-commerce and we are part of 57% of the world’s population which is now connected to the internet. These numbers will help us today to dive into how big this market is, how big this economy is and how we have to act after 5 or 10 years.
Key data:
- There are 5.11 billion unique mobile users in the world today;
- There were 4.39 billion internet users in 2019;
- There were 3.48 billion social media users in 2019.
Can you imagine the size of the audience ready to dive into technology, ready to pay, click on your button when you put it on your webpage or on your application?
If we take a huge penetration of the internet in the modern world, if we take the digital Millenials what we call the generation which is ready to adopt these technologies and if we add the social media accounts which are the huge part of the world since everybody is connected to social media and if we open access to products and services, we have the growth of e-commerce.
If we have to look on the map and see how these emerging markets are geographically acting, we see that the highest level of saturation of digital e-commerce is in the developed countries. For example, in the USA, in the UK or in Western Europe this number is very low, it is decreasing by the revenues, numbers of the sales in e-commerce or in the different parts of e-commerce. But if we take Middle East, Asia, Pacific or Central European countries, we see the growth for 10 -15%, meaning that the penetration of the internet is very high among the population of these countries. It is because big markets with the big players like Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, jd.com, Zalando are generating a huge number of revenues on the sales year by year.
What can be said about e-commerce in Georgia?
Regarding UniPAY, Koba describes how they faced the growth of the emerging market as a local company, how the big brands came into their agenda. They are creating tools and providing the payment options to the merchants who want to open their shop in short notice, who want to start accepting online payments using the ready-made tools. UniPay is the one and only official partner of Shopify, Wix.com and Ecwid in Georgia.
The big brands entering into the emerging market of Georgia resulted in the rise of the number of registered merchants. This made everything easy for entrepreneurs who want to open a shop. They already have the tools that they need and with one simple click, they are adding payment methods and accepting payments online. But these tools are not only for accepting payments, but there are also a lot of marketing stuff inside, a lot of plugins, CRM, ready-made tools to use for reaching your audience or spreading your business online
When we think about the emerging markets in small countries like Georgia, it doesn’t mean that modern technology will not reach us, but on the opposite, they are investing in more productive capacity.
What will E-commerce trends be for the next 5 years:
- Data-driven e-commerce delivers great value to even more areas.
- Internet of things, big data, algorithm-driven supply, chatbots, etc… they are giving us new opportunities to shape the future of the e-commerce market.
Biggest opportunities and challenges are coming ahead…
E-commerce is experiencing monumental growth. It went from being a $1.3 trillion industry in 2014 to a $3.5 trillion industry in 2019. And by 2023, it will reach more than $6.5 trillion.
This means there is a huge opportunity for e-commerce brands and the sky is truly the limit.
So you need to continually build your brand, you need to stay on top of trends, which aspects of e-commerce are changing, what customers are most receptive to with marketing, and so on. But one thing we know is that they are already technology-focused and they want to be online. Based on this, you have to think about how to develop new businesses and become successful.
You can watch Koba Kurdadze’s full talk discussing e-commerce in emerging markets here.