JAKARTA: E-commerce players in the country saw their sales and revenues climb in the first six months of this year, demonstrating the resilience of the infant industry amid an economic slowdown and weakening consumer purchasing power during the period.
Online business platforms from marketplaces to ticket-booking sites have reaped more than what they expected, a contrast to the lackluster performances recorded by many brick-and-mortar retail giants.
Elevenia, a marketplace jointly operated by telecommunications operator XL Axiata and South Korea’s SK Planet, has even raised its sales target.
“As our growth was quite good in the first six months, the shareholders want us to raise our target to
Rp 1.3 trillion [US$96.05 million] this year from an initial target of Rp 1.1 trillion,” said Elevenia marketing division vice president Madeleine Ong De Guzman.
People were learning to compare prices online and Elevenia offered more budget prices than offline stores, she said last week on the sidelines of a discussion held by MarkPlus.
Elevenia’s total transactions in the first half alone, according to Guzman, already hit more than 50 percent of the new target, with last month’s transaction forecast to stand at no less than Rp 130 billion.
Elevenia’s growth is a contrast to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth that declined to 4.67 percent in the second quarter from 4.7 percent in the first quarter.
Yusi Obon, the communications head of marketplace Bukalapak, also said that her firm recorded a satisfying performance amid the economic downturn in the first half.
“An advantage of online business is that our operational costs are not as high as those offline,” she told The Jakarta Post.
Bukalapak, which was pioneered in 2010, aims to grow by between 10 and 20 percent in terms of transactions and revenues, according to Yusi.
Echoing a similar optimistic view, ticket-booking sites tiket.com and Ezytravel are even trying to raise their bars by aiming to triple their web traffic this year and record new revenue records each month.
Tiket.com managing director Gaery Undarsa said that while the travel industry might slow down a bit because of lower consumer purchasing power, his firm achieved good revenue growth in the January to June period of this year.
“There’s probably a shifting behavior from buying tickets offline to buying them online,” he said.
During the Idul Fitri exodus period, ticket sales doubled or even more compared to the same period last year, he explained.
Operating under Global Tiket Network, tiket.com sells transportation tickets and hotel vouchers and has employed 250 people in its four years of operation to handle growing sales traffic.
The firm recorded 1.9 million ticket bookings last year, with most of them coming from frequent individual travelers, according to the firm’s internal data.
Ezytravel, which is part of travel giant Dwidaya Tour, meanwhile, successfully expanded its revenues by more than 100 percent in almost every month.
“For us, every month of this year is a new record,” said EzyTravel chief technology officer Doddy Lukito.
