VietNamNet Bridge - Cross-border e-commerce (CBE) is deleting traditional trade boundaries, and creating equal opportunities for distributors and retailers.

A survey by the Vietnam E-commerce and Information Technology Agency (VECITA) in 2016 found that 32 percent of Vietnam’s import/export companies established business relations with foreign partners through online channels, 11 percent participate in international e-marketplaces and 49 percent have websites.

Of the import/export companies which have websites, 46 percent use ‘.vn’ domain name, 54 percent international domain names and 63 percent of websites have versions in foreign languages.

CBE now makes up 21 percent of total e-commerce turnover in the globe. In China alone, the CBE revenue exceeded the VND1 trillion threshold in 2016 while it has been witnessing the 30 percent growth rate on average since 2008.

There are no official statistics about Vietnam’s CBE, but analysts say the situation is partially reflected in the transactions via Alibaba, the world’s largest B2B trading floor. 

Cross-border e-commerce (CBE) is deleting traditional trade boundaries, and creating equal opportunities for distributors and retailers.

There were 500,000 trading accounts found on Alibaba.com in 2016, while the number of new members increased by 100,000 ever year in the last three years.

The analysis on Alibaba’s B2B model showed that there are 160 million buyers all over the globe with the average transaction value of $2 billion. Vietnam is among top 7 largest markets with 28 million buyers on Alibaba.

According to Tran Dinh Toan, CEO of OSB, the official authorized agent of Alibaba in Vietnam, in the past, small and medium businesses attached importance to e-commerce for their import/export activities because of limited direct operation capacity. 

In recent years, large corporations also see online trade as an important tool to implement their plan to develop markets.

With the increasingly large scale of the Vietnamese market, in 2016, an alliance to support CBE in Vietnam was established with the participation of Alibaba, OSB, VPBank and PTI, providing solution packages to support online export, from helping to look for importers to ensuring finance to insuring goods.

The EBI 2017 released by the Vietnam E-commerce Association (Vecom) shows that there is an imbalance in cross-border import and export.

Businesses mostly export products through B2B floors, while they don’t pay high attention to B2C. Meanwhile, Vietnam’s individual customers buy goods and services from overseas more than foreigners buy goods and services from Vietnam.

The statistics on Fado.vn showed that in 2014-2016, Fado supported Vietnamese customers to buy 80 million products on Amazon, mostly clothing, electronics and products for children and mothers. 

Meanwhile, it only helped 20 Vietnamese businesses sell 100 product items on Amazon, mostly fine arts, healthcare products and machines specifically made by Vietnamese.

Vecom believes that Vietnamese like buying goods on Amazon, eBay and Alibaba because these are prestigious global online sellers, while Vietnamese online sellers still cannot gain customers’ confidence.

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