THE JAKARTA POST/ANN

Latest study forecasts social commerce to directly influence 25 percent or US$42 billion of annual e-commerce sales in Southeast Asia by the end of 2022, the majority of which happened on social media platforms such as TikTok, Facebook and Instagram.

The inaugural report titled Social Commerce in Southeast Asia 2022 was released on Wednesday by Cube Asia, a market-intelligence company offering granular-market data, competitive insights and cost benchmarks for online retail in Southeast Asia.

“[Social commerce] trends are making [e-commerce] space more complex, leading different brands to ask the same questions about social commerce: ‘How big is it? Is it a viable channel for our brand? Is it profitable? Which platforms can help us scale it up?’,” reads the report.

The report categorizes the whole social-commerce segment into four archetypes, which are not mutually exclusive: live commerce, conversational commerce, community-group buy and social-platform commerce.

The latter contributed the largest figure in the Southeast Asia region with US$34 billion and this archetype refers to any form of sales activity that occurs directly on social-media platforms, whether it is live shopping, conversational commerce or community-group buy.

The report says social-platform commerce in Southeast Asia can grow by around 20-30 percent of compound annual-growth rate with a value of around $85 billion to $125 billion in five years.

Thanks to its various distinctive features and solutions, TikTok is currently leading the market, despite how Facebook and Instagram had a relatively massive head start.

However, Facebook was traditionally the goliath when it comes to live commerce; that is, until Meta, its parent company, removed the feature in October this year, a maneuver which expert believed to be Meta’s effort on making Instagram its ultimate stop for live commerce.

The live-commerce market itself has been reverberating loudly given how it grew by more than tenfold in 2022 alone to a respectable size of $13 billion, with Vietnam and Thailand the most-active audiences. According to the report, 55 percent of the traction takes place on social-media platforms and the rest was carried out elsewhere.