Mr. Vu Ba Phu, Director of the Trade Promotion Department (Ministry of Industry and Trade)

What are the opportunities for Vietnamese enterprises through e-commerce platforms? 

E-commerce in Vietnam has grown very rapidly in recent years, especially during the Covid period. Thanks to e-commerce, Vietnamese businesses have more export promotion channels, in other words, businesses have a channel to directly export products to foreign markets.

Exporting through electronic platforms presents a number of opportunities for Vietnamese enterprises, especially small and medium enterprises because their financial capacity limit s direct access to foreign markets.

Without e-commerce, these businesses don’t have the opportunity to put their products on the shelves of supermarkets or distributors in major markets. Instead, Vietnamese businesses can directly export their brands on e-commerce platforms like Alibaba to major markets and directly to consumers in the US, Japan, EU, and Singapore.

Through e-commerce platforms, Vietnamese enterprises have the opportunity to diversify their export markets. Alibaba, for example, has over 300 million registered customers and 26 million active regular buyers spread across 200 countries around the world. Therefore, this can be a means for enterprises to diversify their export markets instead of focusing on only a few large markets.

What should businesses pay attention to affirm the value of products as well as become a sustainable export channel on the e-commerce platform, sir?

Digital transformation helps businesses a lot when it comes to saving costs in trade promotion, saving time by the scope and scale of marketing campaigns in a shorter time.

The benefits are like that, but when promoting export trade directly on e-commerce platforms, the most important issue businesses need to pay attention to is to prepare human resources ready for this export activity. Moreover, exporting via e-commerce requires businesses to know the local language, have a live transaction specialist, answer online, and take care of customers.

In addition, the technical factor also needs staff to take care of the booth regularly and continuously, ensuring that when customers search, they can access eye-catching and effective products.

It is worth noting that when exporting through e-commerce platforms, businesses need to comply with the specific regulations of the exchanges from specifications, packaging, the quantity of storage, and reserve and besides, they must pay attention to customs procedures, as well as other policies as with traditional export activities.

On the side of the Trade Promotion Agency (Ministry of Industry and Trade), there have been coordination activities with many domestic and foreign e-commerce platforms to focus on training awareness raising for businesses.

When the meaning and effects of direct export promotion activities have been improved through e-commerce, the Ministry of Industry and Trade and its partners provide training courses on business skills for enterprises and; at the same time, support businesses to implement marketing campaigns on digital platforms to improve brand and product coverage.