E-payment takes preference over cash in online shopping

MANILA, Philippines — Digital payments have emerged as the preferred mode of payment for online shopping in the country after overtaking cash last year, PayMaya said.

PayMaya founder and CEO Orlando Vea said cashless modes of payment such as e-wallets, cards, and bank transfers have most likely reached a tipping point in 2020.

Citing data from Google, Temasek, Bain & Co., Euromonitor, and PayMaya itself, Vea said over 50 percent of online shopping transaction value in the country were paid via cashless means last year.

“From cash on delivery, today COD now means cashless orders and delivery,” he said.

“In 2020 alone, we processed over P95 billion worth of online shopping transactions across all of our platforms, which only shows that consumer preference for cashless payments and online shopping is overwhelmingly present,” Vea said.

He said the country is on the cusp of an online shopping explosion in the next two years as fintech providers, digital players, businesses, and the government accelerate the digital pivot.

PayMaya believes the country’s digital shift is expected to be bolstered further by the launch of the updated e-commerce Philippines Roadmap 2022 by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) last Friday.

Under the updated roadmap, the DTI is targeting to increase e-commerce merchants to one million from a base of 500,000 and hike e-commerce contribution to GDP to 5.5 percent from the current rate of 3.4 percent.

Vea said the conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic have accelerated the push for e-commerce, but the support of players in the entire ecosystem will “turbo-charge” its growth all the way to next year.

“With the guidance of DTI and the push to make e-commerce easy for all players involved, we are seeing online shopping and cashless payments boom in the country like never before,” he said.

“Consumers are now used to ordering online or via their phones and paying via cashless, and many businesses have accelerated their migration to digital, so there’s no turning back now when it comes to digital payments and e-commerce in the Philippines,” Vea said.

Vea said it is not only the large merchants that are going into e-commerce, but even the small businesses as well.

“So we really expect this sector to grow by leaps and bounds in the coming years. We will continue to introduce new platforms and programs that will help push the envelope on online and mobile shopping even further, as a support for this concerted push by the government and the private sector,” he said.

PayMaya said it saw a marked increase in the number of micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises utilizing its cashless payments solutions last year as many of them migrate or begin their operations online.

DTI has recorded as much as 900,000 newly registered business just last year.

PayMaya is the only end-to-end digital payments ecosystem enabler in the country with platforms and services that cut across consumers, merchants, communities, and government.

It provides over 28 million Filipinos with access to financial services which they can use to conveniently pay, add money, cash out or remit through its over 200,000 digital touchpoints nationwide, the widest network in the country.