H2 2020: The State of E-Commerce in Singapore

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Singapore is one of the fastest-growing e-commerce markets in Southeast Asia, with a projected e-commerce revenue of US$ 2.8 million in 2021. Driven by pandemic-related measures like social distancing and closing off non-essential retail businesses, Singapore’s e-commerce sales continued to surge through 2020. 

A recent survey by Rakuten Insight suggested that 32% of Singaporeans made online purchases weekly in 2020. It is no secret that consumers were shopping online more frequently in 2020 compared to the years before. 

We wanted to measure how much Singapore’s e-commerce sector has grown from 2019 to 2020: with that, we compared our State of E-Commerce in Singapore for 2019 and made some insightful observations:

The average transit time to the first delivery attempt was 1.4 days 

In our previous Singapore study, we found that the average transit time to first delivery was 1.3 days in 2019. As soon as the pandemic hit in 2020, we were expecting the average transit time to the first delivery attempt to increase tremendously. Our joint study with iPrice Group showed that the transit time in Singapore increased from 1.3 to 1.5 days – a slight increase of 15% compared to neighboring countries like Malaysia – which saw a 119% increase. 

In the second half of 2020, the Singapore government announced the start of the second phase of re-opening, also known as the “circuit breaker period”. As Singapore moved into phase 2, more stores were allowed to reopen (essential and non-essential). Singaporeans were able to get their necessities and relive the physical shopping experience in stores. This might have had a positive impact on transit times as consumers began to make their way to physical stores and became less reliant on online shopping. 

98% of parcels were successfully delivered at the first attempt 

As more consumers were working from home, the number of missed deliveries have decreased with t 98% of parcels successfully delivered at first attempt. Many companies in Singapore also decided to continue work-from-home arrangements despite the relaxation of government restrictions. The inconvenience of having to reschedule missed deliveries was greatly reduced as there was always someone home to receive all the parcels. 

55% of international shipments came from China, the US, and Malaysia 

This comes as no surprise as it is wholly consistent with our previous study on Singapore where the top 3 international shipments origins were China, the US, and Malaysia. The top e-commerce sites in Singapore are Shopee, Lazada, Qoo10, and Amazon; and these online marketplaces host sellers from all over the world.

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