Private Seller on The Rise in E-Commerce Platform

The hit of Covid-19 to the world has brought many negative impacts, however, it is the opposite for e-commerce where the industry has shown a spike during the pandemic.

The Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) has also announced that e-commerce has boosted many businesses especially micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), to stay afloat.

An insight into the country’s informal sector has been conducted where the data were crawled from an e-commerce platform.

Among the categories in the platform, the women’s collection category leads with the highest percentage of 28.7% followed by the Home Appliances and Kitchen category with 23%.

Moreover, there are two categories that appeared with the same percentage which are Men’s Collection and Unisex Collection both 14.5% respectively.

Analysing further, the analytics has shown that within the Women Collection category, the number of private sellers are spread across categories as shown in the data.

In the analytics, the private and company type is interpreted as small sellers and established businesses and interestingly they are both focusing on different categories.

Therefore, it is visible that the Bags & Wallet category is the top category for private type while Watches & Fashion Accessories is the main category for the company type.

A similar trend can be seen among Men Collection where the Watches & Fashion Accessories preceded the other categories for the company type while the private type is dominated by Bags & Wallets.