Is Ecommerce Platforms Too Saturated in Hong Kong?

Before getting into the topic, let’s explore the Hong Kong ecommerce market size.

According to Statista, the revenue of the Hong Kong eCommerce market is worth around US25.50 billion in 2022. The annual growth rate (CAGR 2022-2025) of 14.18%, leading to an approximate market size of US$37.96bn by 2025.

The number of ecommerce users is projected to be 6.5m users by 2025, but the Hong Kong population projection is expected to be around 7.7m with 0.7% growth each year (optimistic situation). According to Hong Kong Government data, the youth population significantly declined in 2022. Moreover, this age group is the highest proportion amoung the share of e-shoppers. On the other hand, the user penetration rate in the eCommerce market is expected to 74% in 2022 and will grow to 83.8% by 2025. It is important that the ARPU is anticipated to amount US$4.37k. One more important factor is that cross-border contributes the majority of online spending, at around 65% of the HK total ecommerce spending.

As one of the eCommerce technology service providers, it is so surprising that the ecommerce platform providers in this tiny market are extremely competitive. In the below table, we can see at least 23 companies seizing market share on Saas platforms. For the international providers, it still makes sense to burn money for seizing market share since the market scale is quite different.

The booming of eCommerce platforms happened in 2020~2021 due to pandemic and government funding subsidize. For many shop owners, they got motivated to bring their offline business to online by government funding and market demand. However, what is about the post-pandemic market? Is the HK market big enough to accommodate so many players?

Warren Buffet – Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.

Saas platforms
(randomly ordered)
International
1/. Shopify
2/. Wix
3/. Square Online
4/. Squarespae
5/. SAP commerce
6/. bigCommerce
7/. Craftcommerce
8/. Weebly
9/. Saleforce commerce
10/. NetsuiteCommerce

HK Domestics
1/. Shopline
2/. Boutir
3/. Mshop
5/. Shopage
6/. Posify
7/. Magiccart
8/. Openstore
9/. Zeek
10/. Shopolar
11/. Timway
12/. Easystore
13/. 91APP

Sofware
1/. Prestashop
2/. Magento
3/. Woocommerce
4/. OpenCart
5/. Odoo commerce

Marketplace
Cross-border
1/. Taobao/Tmall
2/. JD
3/. Amazon
4/. Rakuten
5/. Lazada
6/. Shopee
Domestic
1/. HKTVMALL
2/. Ztore
3/. Theclub
4/. Watson
5/. Dailyfarm
6/. Foodpanda
7/. YesAsia

The latest Hong Kong population statistic from Government Gensus and Statistics Department