E-commerce in the Philippines

E-commerce

Internet access

According to Euromonitor, 44.3% of the Philippine population uses the internet, 29.1% of households have access to the internet (out of which only 3.7% have access to broadband internet), and 44% of mobile subscribers have access to broadband service on their mobile phones. As of 2018, there are 35.44 smartphone users in the Philippines, and that figure is expected to grow to 46.04 million by 2022. The most popular search engines are Google (95.27%), Yahoo! (3.69%), Bing (0.84%), Baidu (0.05%), DuckDuckGo (0.05%) and Never (0.02%).

E-commerce market

The Philippines is a thriving market for investors, as the country’s economic situation is improving, and most of the population are young and fervent internet users. The rising middle class, high consumer spending and a young and vibrant, tech-savvy population is driving e-commerce forward by leaps and bounds. In 2017, the market was worth US$ 7.9 billion, and it's estimated to grow into a US$10 billion industry by 2025. There is good reason to be optimistic about e-commerce growth in the Philippines. However, the country also faces challenges to its growth, such as: slow internet speed (only 4.5 MBPS, the slowest in the Asia Pacific), low PC penetration (which is estimated at 31.2%), low broadband penetration (broadband access from home accounts for only 3.7% of households) and low digital payment penetration (70% of Filipinos do not use banks and less than 3% use credit cards).

Social media

Filipinos are prolific users of social media. Estimates this year show that there are 48 million active social media users from the Philippines.  Of this number, 60 million are on Facebook; 12 million on Twitter and 4 million are LinkedIn users.  The Philippines is recognised as one of the top countries for internet users worldwide in terms of time spent on social media; 3.2 hours on mobile and 5.2 hours on desktop and tablet. The most popular social networks are Facebook (82.8%), YouTube (7.09%), Pinterest (4.32%), Twitter (4.22%), Tumblr (0.57%) and Reddit (0.43%).