E-commerce is probably the hottest industry in Indonesia right now. And it just so happens that e-commerce is also the industry that makes Indonesia arguably the hottest emerging economy in the world right now.

We worked to dig in more, gathered more data from our friends at e-commerce sites to see how we could extract some knowlegde from those numbers. Working together with our friends at Veritrans, DS Research initiated a study on Indonesia’s e-commerce scene. We pulled the numbers from some of Indonesia’s biggest e-commerce sites and came up with some fascinating facts about the industry.

This project started off as an independent research at Harvard Business School by the management team of Veritrans. The way we did the research was by collecting data and information as well as doing interviews with Indonesia’s leading e-commerce sites. We also did a survey that was distributed via email and social media for people to fill in. We received 584 responses from over 1000 invitations sent. 60% of the respondents were women and well educated 15-34 year olds.

In this report, we also compared Indonesia’s e-commerce scene with other internet economies such as Brazil, China and the US in order to get a trend and growth assumption for the future. We used two approaches with this research: Top-down analysis where we crunched the market cap numbers from public data & consumer survey; and also bottom-up analysis where we crunched the numbers based on the data given to us by e-commerce sites.

This report also exposed how and where people are accessing the Internet, average time spent online, Internet usage, mobile usage, online shopping behavior, popular e-commerce sites, payment methods, and average transaction size. At the end of the report, you can see Indonesia’s growth opportunity in terms of e-commerce business as well as the challenges in order to maximise those potentials.

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Credit: Thank you for Naning Utoyo and Ramda Y for designing this report.

Feel free to download this report and distribute it as long it remains unmodified and credited to DS Research and Veritrans. Email to [email protected] for further information on Indonesia tech-related research projects.