Southeast Asia’s Internet economy is expected to continue growing at an unprecedented pace. According to a report by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company, the region’s internet economy will reach US$360 billion by 2025, with e-commerce being a key growth driver.

However, the lack of talent is hindering local e-commerce players from thriving in the Internet economy.

At a recent panel discussion, Dr Roh Sungjong, SMU’s Assistant Professor of Communication Management, highlights that collaborations between industry players and higher educational institutions are key to closing the skills gap.

“[Such collaborations] provide actionable knowledge learning opportunities for people in the e-commerce industry," he says. Those programmes, he adds, will help develop better problem solvers as learners will be tasked to apply what they have learnt to real-life issues in the e-commerce space. Those learners will also gain an agile mindset, which is crucial in helping organisations address the ever-changing business and customer demands.

In line with this, digital commerce enabler Synagie is partnering with Singapore Management University (SMU) to equip over 3,000 professionals in Singapore with skills needed by the e-commerce sector by 2025.

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More than 60 SMU-certified programmes across seven areas of focus will be co-developed by SMU Academy (SMUA), the professional training arm of SMU and Synagie Commerce Academy (SCA).

They include: personal development, customer business development, channel development management, marketing and creative services, supply chain operations, customer engagement solutions, and business analytics solutions.

Complemented by SMUA’s highly interactive, collaborative, and project-based approach to learning, the modules delivered at SMUA will be taught by leading e-commerce and tech experts with industry experience.

The programmes will be launched progressively in the later part of this year. Upon successful completion of the programme, participants will receive a certificate jointly issued by SMU and SCA.

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ShopBack’s way of acquiring and retaining customers

While e-commerce can help widen the pool of customers as businesses are no longer restricted to geographical boundaries, it has also made customer acquisition and loyalty more challenging. This is because of the increasing number of competitors and the move towards cookieless marketing.

Joel Leong, co-founder of ShopBack shares how the company is overcoming that challenge, at the same panel discussion with Roh. “We had to make sure our existing product continues to work as it should be. But on top of that, we need to come up with new use cases for our product that are adjacent or totally different from what we previously used to acquire customers or to make them sticky with our product,” he says.

He went on: “[So what we did was to take] a step back to find out what customers are doing offline and how ShopBack can be a part of that. [This has led to the launch of] ShopBack Pay… which has helped us to retain customers much better and also tap onto a new pool of users.

“So we constantly have to think of new ways. And those new ways help us to grow. If not, we will stay stagnant or face diminishing returns.”

Another area that e-commerce players tend to struggle with is data, or more specifically balancing the use of data for personalisation and ensuring data privacy.

“Personalisation is one of the most useful toolkits for e-commerce but there should be a balance. We are [increasingly] seeing customers leaving brands not because of insufficient personalisation but because of too much personalisation [that] customers are more aware of privacy more than ever. So there should be a balance that you need to aim at,” says Roh.

Collaborations are necessary to close the skills gap in e-commerce

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