Korea’s 11street poised to ride spread of Thai e-commerce 

The company aims to ride the healthy growth of Thai e-commerce and active competition.
Hong Cheol Jeon, 11street Thailand’s chief executive officer, said the company has been sharing in the growth of e-commerce in Thailand after launching its business here in February 2017.
Currently, 20,000 sellers and 690,000 buyers in Thailand are active on the platform with total gross merchant value (GMV) of US$50 million (Bt1.65 billion) from 6.5 million stock keeping units (SKU). 
“Thailand is the latest country where we are strongly growing. It is now US$50 million of GMV, only a half of $100 million GMV in Malaysia where the company has been operating for four years.”
Meanwhile, GMV in Turkey has hit US$1 billion while in South Korea it is $7 billion.
Jeon said it aims to double the number of sellers and buyers in Thailand in 2018 and to increase total products listed to more than 10 million SKUs. 
The firm is maintaining its $30-million marketing budget to boost transactions in the Thai market. Most of the budget is spent on promotions, campaigns, and discounts.
He said normally there are three revenue streams for the company: transaction fee, advertising or product listing, and interest from the escrow system. For now, in Thailand, it has only revenue from transaction fee of 5 to 10 per cent.
“In Thailand, there is a lot of room for growth for e-commerce as currently the penetration rate of e-commerce is only 1.2 per cent when compared to the total retail industry. It is expected to increase to be around 5 to 7 per cent in the next couple of years,” said Jeon.
He said Thailand is a very competitive e-commerce market and that is good for the market and customers, as high competition brings high value to products and that is good for customers and also helps drive market growth.
“E-commerce trend is lifestyle based e-commerce. Customers might make quicker purchase because of some promotion or campaign. We found that Thai shoppers love promotions, discounts and benefits. The top three product categories on the platform are: electronics, baby and kids, and beauty and health,” said Jeon.
In Thailand, most shoppers are young and educated and around 80 per cent of payments are made via credit cards. The average transaction volumn is about 3,000 per month while the average basket size is around Bt1,400.
Jeon said in Thailand, there are 17 million visits per month and about 1.2 to 1.4 per cent of them convert into transactions. The transactions are 50:50 from mobile phones and computers although about 70 per cent of visitors are on mobile devices.
“November is the highlight month of the year for us. We expect to see transactions rise to about Bt5,000 on average,” said Jeon.
The company has launched “11.11 Mega Sale”, offering 400,000 discount coupons worth over Bt72 million.