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The e-commerce sector could contribute P1.2 trillion to the economy by 2022, representing 5.5% of gross domestic product (GDP), according to the government’s new e-commerce roadmap.
This projection is double the 2020 baseline of P599 billion, or 3.4% of GDP, Commerce Secretary Ramón M. López said in the online launch on Friday. The department also plans to double the number of e-commerce companies.
“We expect to increase the number of e-commerce companies from 500,000 in 2020 to 750,000 by 2021 and one million by 2022,” he said.
To develop the roadmap, the department held focus group discussions attended by organizations from the payments, logistics, platforms and government sectors.
The new roadmap updates the 2016-2022 version, which aimed for the industry to represent 25% of GDP by 2020, up from 10% in 2015. The previous roadmap targeted 100,000 micro, small and medium-sized enterprises to venture into e-commerce.
The Commerce department told a press conference that the methodologies used for the new goals have changed after refining the definitions of what counts as electronic commerce.
The 2022 roadmap has four key factors, including making e-commerce easy and fast, improving the ease of doing business to improve market access, digitizing businesses, and reducing logistics costs.
The increase in e-commerce use during the lockdown amid the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic last year, Lopez said, also resulted in an increase in consumer complaints. Consumers had turned to shopping online as health restrictions and public health anxiety reduced foot traffic in shopping malls.
The total number of complaints reached 15,967 for the year, Lopez said.
“For e-commerce to be successful, the government and private sector must install redress mechanisms that are much more efficient than the ones we have today,” he said.
“But we must also instill values and ethics in our citizens, both merchants and consumers, so that they serve as a basis for confidence in our country’s electronic commerce.”
The Philippine Retailers Association had said that sector sales are likely to remain around 20-30% below pre-pandemic levels this year as consumers continue to stay home and cut back on spending.
Trade name registrations with the Commerce department in 2020 grew by their largest margin in a decade, reaching around 900,000 in mid-December, or 41% more than the previous year.
Online retailer registrations jumped to 88,000 at the end of 2020 from around 1,700 between January and March.
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