🇹🇼Consumers in February
Shopee umnanned 🏪|Green economy 📈| Online groceries 📉
2023 has begun more upbeat for Taiwan retail than the end of 2022.
Taiwan's consumer confidence index (CCI), rose 0.61 points to 59.73. In December 2022, the CCI hit 59.12, the lowest since the economic crisis of 2008.
The Lunar New Year festival in January generated new single-month highs for Taiwan's retail and food and beverage sectors. Revenue for January reached NT$408.2 billion (US$13.43 billion), an increase of 4.2% from 2022.
A look at what happened in the last month：
Shopee launches unmanned Smart Stores
After disrupting convenience store pick-up with the launch of its ‘store to store’ Shopee stores in 2021, the Singaporean e-commerce giant is set to make further waves with its new unmanned ‘smart stores’. They will help to drive down prices, by eliminating staffing costs.The smart stores use smart lockers to take care of both dropping off and picking up products on the Shopee marketplace. Shoppers can check in and pay using the machines in the store, before picking up their products from the smart locker.
Sellers can print labels for their products, before scanning and placing them in the smart lockers for pick-up.
80% of Taiwanese are willing to pay more for environmentally-friendly products
A Commonwealth Magazine(天下雜誌)survey has found that concerns about the environment increasingly influence Taiwanese consumption choices.
84.7%. of respondents will give priority to whether a home appliance product saves water and electricity when making a purchase.
56.8% of consumers expressed that the environmental impact of a product’s packaging will influence their final purchase decision.
Gender breakdown: Male 50% and Female 63%
When asked how much more they were willing to pay for a greener product:
* Below 10%: 58.6%
* 11~20%: 19.1%
* 21~30%: 4.1%
* More than 30%: 4.5%
* Refused to answer/don’t know: 13.8%
Growth of Online Grocery Delivery Halts Post-Pandemic
The COVID pandemic outbreak in 2020 ushered in a 21.5% growth rate for online grocery deliveries in Taiwan, after a decade of unspectacular growth.
A February report from Mirai Business finds that this growth has decreased dramatically in the second half of 2022, as consumers returned to physical stores. The growth rate of grocery e-commerce in 2022 was 4.5%, a drop from 9.5% in 2021.
Nevertheless, everything is still trending for continued growth, but the market will be dominated by the two grocery leaders in Taiwan, Uni-President(Carrefour and 7-11) and PX Mart(who now also own RtMart), as they have advantages in having a strong logistics network and local stock warehousing (hypermarket and supermarket stores)
For example, the one-hour delivery service launched by PX Mart covers 600 stores in Taiwan (equivalent to 600 satellite warehouses). In 2022, PX Mart’s annual delivery volume exceeded 8 million, representing an annual growth rate of nearly 500%.
