eBay: US, Australia and UK are main buyers of Malaysian products

eBay Malaysia country head trade Wong Mei Inn said a recent survey by eBay showed the US remained as the top export destination for businesses based in Malaysia, with a 60% growth from the previous year (2017).

The survey said the top-selling product category for sellers exporting to the US (126%) is home improvement products whereas for Australia (138%) are computers.

“Buyers from the UK (193%) tend to buy more watches from Malaysian sellers.

“While it’s hard to determine why different categories appeal to buyers, the ongoing strength of the US dollar continues to provide good momentum for Malaysia’s eBay exporters, given its position as eBay’s largest market.”

Recently the government had planned to expand the scope of indirect tax to cover companies in the digital economy, particularly cross-border e-commerce and service firms, could boost tax collection by 3% to 5%, Wong said this is ultimately a decision for Malaysia policy makers.

However, eBay believes such tax collections could help expand the digital economy in the country.

“eBay hopes that any decision (on the taxes) will help further drive adoption of the digital economy by Malaysian businesses,” said Mei Inn.

Apart from that, Mei Inn said eBay Malaysia has its own marketplaces’ shipping and logistics department, which is made up of a team of software engineers who focus on providing services that can be used by eBay buyers and sellers to transport their items from one location to another.

“This involves a lot of different elements, such as integrating with different carriers and building highly-available distributed systems to provide common shipping functions like label generation and rate calculation,” she said.

In cases where the team doesn’t have direct data, machine learning is used to identify how long it will take for an item to get delivered and how much it will cost to ship it via various shipping services.

“eBay builds experiences for our sellers that help them process their shipments easily and manage their post-transaction shipping process from end to end.

“In the past, the process was very manual in which the sellers would have to choose their own logistics partner.

“This means that they would have to research, identify suitable logistics partners and then compare the rates and delivery speed before making a decision on the best logistics partner.”

Now with SEAPASS, it has a more integrated logistics platform and it is free of charge.

eBay is a completely free and easy platform that provides our customers the ease of doing business.

“Whether it’s taking their first step online or exploring new markets, we hope to help SMEs take their businesses to the next level.

“We want our local sellers to grow and potentially have an international presence,” she said.

According to analysts, it is estimated that the Malaysian e-commerce market for 2017 is at US$5.53 billion (RM24.6 billion).

It said the market could expand ten-fold, to US$10-15billion, especially since half of Malaysians already shop online at least monthly and they spend more hours online in general than almost any other country in the region.

Mei Inn added that the retail export opportunity on eBay is very accessible to Malaysian SMEs and businesses compared to more traditional export industries.

“Malaysian businesses not only have the opportunity to grow their business further with the local market, being on eBay enables them to tap into eBay’s global market – accessed by 168 million active buyers worldwide buying items from over 1.1 billion listings in our marketplace.

“With this, we can help Malaysian SMEs expand their business opportunities bringing their ventures to the next level of growth,” she said.