Shippers receive orders at a bakery in Ho Chi Minh City on September 9. Photo: Quynh Tran

Not only Grab, but many other platforms have also been busy expanding their capacity to supply fresh goods and online groceries in recent weeks. On September 2, Tiki decided to open fresh goods delivered in 3 hours in Hanoi.

Meanwhile, MoMo has expressed its ambition to provide C2C (customer-to-customer) e-commerce services with the “whatever you sell” feature that operated on September 7. This feature is easy to apply to the form of purchasing assistance for households, group purchasing, which is being favored by households in apartments, residents of districts, ect… recently.

Explaining the above movement, Mr. Nguyen Ba Diep, Co-Founder and Vice President of MoMo Wallet, said that the new feature was deployed by the technology team in a very short time with the desire to meet the needs of purchasing essential goods during the pandemic.

“We believe that buying and selling between individuals and small businesses will become more and more popular, especially in crowded urban areas. The company will continue to gradually improve this feature and promote it into a key product, based on the available safe and convenient payment platform,” said Mr. Diep.

Grab’s representative said that the decision to expand at this time is to meet the needs of shopping for goods while ensuring the safety of users in the context of the complicated epidemic.

This is also a way to help store partners maintain and improve business operations and increase income opportunities for driver partners during the epidemic season. “Shopping online is the choice of many consumers when the Covid-19 epidemic continues to be complicated,” said Nguyen Thai Hai Van, Managing Director of Grab Vietnam.

Meanwhile, Deputy General Management Director of Tiki E-Commerce platform, Ms. Vu Thi Nhat Linh, said that the decision to start selling fresh food delivered in 3 hours in Hanoi was to “meet the constantly increasing shopping demand before the complicated development of the epidemic”.

She also expects this market to contribute 30% to the total revenue of the fresh food industry. The company is planning to expand this category in 2 other cities in the North.

According to the second quarter e-commerce report published by iPrice, online grocery is the only industry that has maintained steady and consistent growth since the beginning of the epidemic season. Google searches related to the keyword “online grocery store” increased 223% in the last quarter. The number of searches increased 11 times in July compared to May and 3.6 times compared to June, while the social distancing under Directive 16 was implemented in some provinces and cities.

A quick record of Lazada Vietnam shows that, in just the first 2 hours of the 9/9 promotional day, the platform achieved a total revenue increase of more than 2 times, of which LazMall – Lazada’s genuine store system increased by 3 times. Notably, groceries, necessities such as: dry food, processed food, fast food; milk and dairy products; fabric softener… continues to be the top selling product.

Grocery products’ price comparison between Southeast Asia countries

Also according to a survey by iPrice, grocery prices in Vietnam are among the cheapest in Southeast Asia. This unit sets out a grocery cart of 19 items, divided by category and of the same weight or volume, such as starchy foods (bread, rice); eggs, milk, cheese; meat (chicken, beef); fruits and vegetables; water; alcohol, beer and tobacco. After calculating the prices, they determined that the cost of purchasing these items in Vietnam is about 1.2 million VND (54 USD), only higher than the Philippines.

Meanwhile, Singapore leads the ranking with a cost of 2.5 million VND ($110), followed by Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

iPrice further noted, if this cart includes alcohol, beer and cigarettes, the estimated cost is only about 942,000 VND (41 USD). “This shows that, during the Covid-19 period, buying products to serve basic daily living needs in Vietnam is still ‘easier’ than in other countries in the region,” the research team said.

Source: vnexpress.net