Enabling eCommerce – how to realise a digital transition

eCommerce is now a mainstream part of Asia’s commercial ecosystem. Retail businesses have evolved from bricks-and-mortar stores into omnichannel experiences available via stores, websites, and smartphone apps, while traditional B2B companies are exploring new ways to digitally engage with corporate clients.

The global eCommerce market forecast to grow more than 8% per annum over the next three years¹. Asia is at the centre of this shift from offline to online with around one half of the world’s internet users², and eCommerce growth that is expected to grow by more than 11% each year until 2027³. Southeast Asia is a key growth driver for the region, with around one fifth of all retail sales coming from eCommerce⁴. Furthermore, the region accounts for nearly 80% of global B2B eCommerce sales⁵.

Online sales channels are clearly too large to ignore, and the journey from offline to online requires companies to rethink everything from client engagement, technological integration and payment systems. The result is smoother and more data-rich interactions between businesses and their customers.

Why do these companies embark on an eCommerce journey? With 87% of retail shoppers now beginning their shopping journey online⁶, a phone or computer is now the typical starting point of a retail experience. A vivid eCommerce presence is therefore increasingly important. This helps increase brand loyalty, while allowing a company to test new markets and products.

Love, Bonito is one of Singapore’s largest womenswear brands. Established in 2005, the company now has an omnichannel business that not only covers Southeast Asia, but also North America.

eCommerce has enabled the company to build a direct-to-consumer (D2C) model that is on the cusp of becoming a global brand, said Will Vaya, Chief Financial Officer at Love, Bonito.

“eCommerce allows us to own the customer relationship,” he said. “You can deliver your value proposition to the target audience, which is effectively infinite in size compared to a traditional retail business.”

Furthermore, eCommerce makes it easier to expand internationally. An online business can test and learn in new markets in a more capital-efficient manner than opening physical stores. A company can first organically grow its presence via digital brand building, and then start building a traditional branch network when it makes it sense. Love, Bonito now ships internationally to 18 countries.

As business models evolve towards more direct to market sales, eCommerce has become prevalent across an array of industries beyond retail and consumer goods ranging from automobiles to chemicals, logistics and healthcare. Online healthcare is becoming an increasingly important part of the overall eCommerce offering, with the pandemic boosting awareness of the benefits provided by telehealth and telemedicine. The global market for telemedicine is expected to grow to USD 286.2 billion by 2030, from USD 94.4 billion in 2023⁷.

International private healthcare group IHH Healthcare is delivering more of its health and wellness services via a smartphone app, which allows patients to book appointments, keep medical records, and check in to clinics. It is part of a broader ecosystem strategy that can take advantage of advances in MedTech and telemedicine to enhance the patient experience.

“We don’t consider eCommerce as a source of incremental revenue in the short term, but it is a way to build stickiness and increase the lifetime value of a patient. The contribution we get from eCommerce could be over and above what we get from traditional means,” said Manjiv Dodanwela, Group Treasury Transformation Lead, IHH Healthcare.

In the B2B space, Zuellig Pharma rapidly accelerated its digital transformation strategy after the pandemic made face-to-face sales of life-changing medicine to healthcare providers difficult. The company quickly rolled out an initial online sales platform, with the updated version containing features that have the look-and-feel of a consumer-facing eCommerce site.

As the lines between eCommerce and physical sales blur, a seamless customer experience is critical as corporates look to offer a differentiated experience. This requires understanding the customer needs and pain points. Physical outlets continue to be important, offering a physical experience to touch and feel consumer goods, and B2B customers will continue to benefit from face-to-face interactions with salespeople.

This makes the physical check-out experience ever more important where a digital in-store payments solution, such as QR based real-time payments, can play a pivotal role. But over time, when consumers develop brand loyalty, the experience can shift largely towards eCommerce.

A memorable customer experience also leads to ownership of the entire value chain – purchase, delivery, returns, logistics, personalisation and payment. While these can be outsourced, choosing the right partner, including a bank, is critical to the overall experience.

Selling global products with local relevance makes payments and the checkout experience critical to the experience. This is particularly challenging in Asia, where there are multiple markets, each with a wide variety of payment methods, with consumers transitioning from credit cards to real time payments and digital wallets. But when a company is able to offer the right mix of payment options for the markets it operates in, the benefits can be felt across the entire organisation.

Digital payments not only enhance the customer’s journey, they also provide the company with data on client activity that delivers insight into consumer behaviour – from a bird’s-eye view of a market to more granular information on a particular retail outlet or even an individual consumer.

This data is essential to cater to personalisation and consumer preferences, by delivering actionable information on the stores and products that do well, demographic details on customers, and their individual shopping behaviour. In the B2B space, buy now pay later schemes or financing can be offered to customers by leveraging data. For example, credit can be provided to customers that reliably pay ahead of invoice date.

Data can be further leveraged by artificial intelligence to truly personalise the eCommerce consumer experience. In the fashion industry, this could include the fine-grained personalisation of the online journey via the AI’s interpretation of consumer preferences or AI-powered sales agents to tackle challenging customer enquiries.

A digital commerce transition requires all parts of the business to work together towards the final goal. A wide range of factors need to be considered during the process – including the requirements of sales representatives, data security, and a cost-efficient technology rollout.

Treasury has an especially important role to play in this process as an enabler – in particular, its capacity to fund and propel the strategy. A treasurer can measure returns and set effective KPIs by striking a balance between increasing revenue and investments in technology, as well as building a team with talent to drive this fundamental change across the firm, while bringing together different stakeholders.

Most notably, corporate treasury understands digital payments as one of the key ingredients for any eCommerce offering, alongside the seamless flow of data into a corporate’s ERP for ease of reconciliation, visibility and returns.

HSBC Omni Collect is a digital platform that addresses the full range of payment collection needs via a single API. It allows companies to receive money from multiple payments channels, across countries, via a single touchpoint. In addition to simplifying collections, reducing administrative work, and increasing customer satisfaction, Omni Collect’s dashboard presents actionable payments data via its easy-to-use reporting functionality.

A transition towards eCommerce is a team effort that involves the entire company, with treasury playing a leading role. By working with the right banking partner, treasury can better address the opportunities and challenges presented by this process to meet the current and future consumer expectations.

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