E-commerce delivery battle in Vietnam becomes more costly

Shopee on November 4 unexpectedly announced a preferential service package. All clients who buy any product on Shopee and choose Grab as deliveryman for the order will get free shipping as per Shopee’s policy and enjoy Grab’s preferential package with value of up to VND200,000.

The program is applied to sellers and buyers in some districts in HCM City or Hanoi. The delivery is implemented within one hour.

This is not the first time Grab has joined hands with marketplaces to lure customers. In October 2018, Sendo also joined hands with GrabExpress to provide express delivery service package in HCM City, promising to deliver goods within three hours.

After that, in early February the technology firm cooperated with the omni-channel sales and management platform, Sapo, to officially launch integration with GrabExpress, the delivery service.

Nguyen Ngoc Trang from Grab Vietnam said Grab strives for a super-app platform, providing the most important services in everyday life, including transportation, food delivery, goods delivery, cashless payments and more.

Grab last May also joined hands with VinID to deliver goods via Scan & Go app.

Unlike the previous cooperation deals, this time Grab and Shopee are ‘playing big’ as they operate in the two largest e-commerce markets in Hanoi and HCM City and commit to the fastest delivery time.

The latest move by Grab once again shows its ambition of targeting B2B, together with individual clients.

A report from Google and Temasek in 2018 showed that Vietnam’s e-commerce had compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35 percent in 2015-2018 and had value of $2.8 billion (only the value of the B2C channel is counted).

It is expected that the total e-commerce market in Vietnam may have value of $10 billion by 2020, according to the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MOIT).

The market is expected to continue witnessing a boom in 2018-2025 with the CAGR of 27 percent thanks to the popularity of internet and smartphones, and to the new generation of consumers which can adapt quickly to new technologies.

The representative of Google Southeast Asia said at E-commerce Day 2019 that more and more Vietnamese shop online. According to Temasek, 3.2 million Vietnamese have begun online shopping.

Google said Vietnamese consumers are curious, set high requirements on sales and are increasingly impatient.