With a value of 778 billion baht, Thailand's online retail market is expected to be the largest in Southeast Asia in 2019, with retailers needing to differentiate their customer experience from giant online players.
"Retailers in Thailand need to do a lot to attract customers, including understanding their behaviour and helping them from the beginning of the payment process, otherwise they will lose opportunities," said S Pranatharathi Haran, head of business for Southeast Asia at SAP Customer Experience.
SAP research for Asia-Pacific found that for 1,000 Thai consumers, 60% of respondents abandoned purchases at the checkout stage. The top reasons for stopping the purchase were shipping cost (48%), products being out of stock (33%), no discount promotion (33%) and long delivery time (33%).
Some 39% of Thai respondents use the shopping cart as a visual display to compare prices with other brands or websites.
Purchasing decisions were triggered by discounts/promotions (59%), discounts with purchase notification (41%) and recommendations for relevant products (37%).
According to the survey, 70% of Thais who shop online prefer to pay by cash when products are delivered, as they do not trust online payment methods.
Mr Haran said Thailand is digitally connected, with heavy social media use, so the country has the biggest online market, expected to be worth 778 billion baht out of total e-commerce value of 3.3 trillion baht in 2019.
The biggest sectors in e-commerce are wholesale/retail, accommodation and manufacturing.
He suggested retailers integrate online and offline experiences (omni-channel) through the proper use of online strategies.
SAP's customer experience platform is a technology aimed at helping retailers integrate the supply chain and do front-end and back-end system integration to have a single view and real-time inventory. This helps retailers enable customers to shop online and pick up products at physical stores.
Retailers need to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to understand customer insights or preferences. This enables retailers to recommend users and use contextual marketing such as social media information to learn customers' interests and bring back customers with user targeted advertising, retargeted advertising or promotions.
According to an SAP survey, almost half of Thai respondents are interested in recommendations, double the Asia-Pacific average of 25%.
In addition, brands need to provide customers with features to track their product delivery process.
Retailers must enable customers to manage their own data to ensure data privacy and increase customer trust.
"The use of data analytics and customer experience platforms will make retailers understand why and when customers abandon their online purchase," Mr Haran said.
Brands and retailers need to have their own websites or mobile sites instead of relying on giant marketplaces that don't provide access to customers' data and also make it hard for sellers to set themselves apart from rivals.
For example, Tata Group in India launched Tatacliq, a one-stop shop for all Tata products with after-sale service and product refunds that enable the marketplace to profit even though it entered the arena later than rivals such as Amazon and Flipkart did.
"Users are willing to pay more if they can be ensured good products and better after-sale services," Mr Haran said.