More food products have been bought online since the COVID-19 outbreak, online sellers have said.

The coronavirus pandemic has changed consumer shopping behaviour, prompting retailers to embrace online commerce to keep up with new trends.

Overseas e-commerce companies Lazada and Shopee may lose their positions in Vietnam if they keep demonstrating limitations in protecting consumers from low-quality and fake goods.

The "money burning" race in the local e-commerce scene is not over yet, with all Big Four competitors scampering to gain a larger market share.

Lack of regulations on requiring goods invoices is causing the likes of Facebook and Shopee to become indirect culprits of suffusion of goods with unidentified origin, raising concerns on the piracy of genuine products.

The few e-commerce players which survive the stiff competition in the market are all backed by big foreign firms in the region.

Sellers hiking the prices of face masks and hand sanitiser on some e-commerce websites have been fined.

More than 30,000 stores have been closed on online shopping sites including Shopee, Tiki, and Lazada due to overcharging.

Shopee, a leading e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia and Taiwan, has come out on top as the most positively discussed e-commerce platform in Vietnam.

The year-end online shopping frenzy has kicked off with giant local and foreign players like Lazada, Tiki, Sendo, and Shopee rolling out promotions since the middle of last month.

Singaporean investors are continuing to pour capital into e-logistics firms to tap into the fast-growing market in Vietnam.

Despite non-stop spending, Lazada remains overwhelmed by local platforms Sendo and Mobile World, in addition to other players Shopee and Tiki.

Each e-commerce platform needs to spend millions of US dollars to gain a single per cent of market share from competitors, showing just how serious the competition is.

Sendo, for the first time, was listed as one of the four most visited ecommerce platforms in the second quarter of 2019, according to data from iPrice Insights’ map of ecommerce.

The targeted companies include Samsung Vietnam, Grab, Sun Group, Yamaha, Shopee, VNG, Huawei Vietnam, among others.

Shopee and Tiki maintained their positions as the two leading sites in terms of traffic in Viet Nam’s e-commerce sector in the first quarter of this year.

The owners of Shopee, Lazada and Tiki, the best known e-commerce websites in Vietnam, all are foreigners.