Maximizing Singapore's e-commerce

I came to Singapore because I took one look at the stats on digital knew it was going to be big. In APAC we are third for internet penetration (behind Korea and Japan) and smartphone penetration is around 80% which makes my home country of the UK look practically Stone Age.

Surprising then that e commerce is so under developed, the Singapore pastime of going to the mall at the weekend to shop has put less emphasis on shopping via a website. The output of e commerce being fairly new is that there is no one in an organization that is accountable for a digital budget.

Further to this there is little planning to give digital an annual budget, which forces it into the tactical realms, diminishing the effectiveness of it. A popular situation with local clients can be found below.

'Great' says client 'this makes perfect sense for the customer...now all we have to do is convince the five other departments that this is a good idea to pool the budget'. Different priorities, initiatives, and bosses often stop good digital customer ideas dead in their tracks, preventing any sort of consistent, organised communication online.

The problem with being tactical is that it dictates when we say it and often reduces the impact. Often we find ourselves at the end of the year, having launched 100 products; but not really having anything substantial to show for it, we have an empty pithy feeling.

It’s sort of like a depressing new year’s when you realised you didn’t stick to any of your resolutions or do what you said you were going to and promise you will do better next year. The thing about digital is that someone somewhere will always be researching using search, always be on Facebook, and always be using their mobile device.They don’t all flock to these channels when product managers decide they have something

It’s not all doom and gloom though, companies with e commerce at the heart of their business are taking note. Travel, Telco, and Finance are leading the way. The main difference with these companies is that they usually have someone directly responsible for delivering sales via online.

I’d say 90% of Singapore companies don’t have this headcount yet, the people that get lumbered with this rather important responsibility don’t have the skill sets. I know of one Singapore client where the webmaster is also responsible for driving sales, but the budget is held by the marketing team (the marketing team aren’t directly KPI’d with driving sales in case you were wondering).

My advice if you are a Singapore client that’s reading this is two-fold.

Pool your budgets

Don’t settle for 23 teeny weeny tactical digital campaigns over the course of the year. Have a good think about how you want to change your business using digital for the next FY, get 2 or 3 good initiatives and make someone responsible for it.

Have quarterly catch ups with them and make sure there is momentum. Help them get over roadblocks from people that are scared of using digital.

Have someone responsible for driving online sales for your company

If you do this then you are ahead of most Singapore companies. Get a platform for driving sales, be honest about how good it is, and be ruthless about getting it right.

Put money behind it and work out how much you need to spend on one sale to make it profitable. Make that person sweat over driving incremental sales every quarter.

Do this for a year and you will have shifted your company on more than that mess of tactical banners driving to microsites you did in 2011.