Competition between PChome Online Inc (網路家庭) and Shopee Taiwan Co Ltd (樂購蝦皮) in the domestic e-commerce market is heating up further.
Last week, PChome subsidiary PChomestore Inc (商店街) said it was launching a promotional campaign to celebrate the number of shops on its platform reaching 50,000.
“PChomestore has largely outpaced Shopee, which has 2,000 registered stores,” the company said in a statement on Thursday, adding that it is to offer coupons of NT$520 (US$17.17) with the redeem code “PC I love you” for purchases exceeding NT$4,965 on its platform.
The company is listed on the Taipei Exchange under stock number 4965.
The move came right after Shopee on Wednesday announced on Facebook that it would give customers NT$520 cash discounts on purchases exceeding NT$8,044.
PChome Online’s stock number on the exchange is 8044.
The code to redeem Shoppee’s discount is “PC520,” which in Mandarin sounds like “PC I love you.”
The two companies have in recent years engaged in fierce competition in the domestic consumer-to-consumer (C2C) business.
Last year, PChome subsidiary Ruten.com (露天拍賣) saw sales decline partly as it lost C2C market share to Shopee.
This year, PChome has seen a migration of sellers from Shopee to PChomestore’s C2C platform, after lowering its free-delivery threshold to NT$99 from NT$199 in April and abolishing the minimum purchase entirely in August.
Last week, PChome announced it would establish a five-person decisionmaking team led by chairman Jan Hung-tze (詹宏志) to cope with the fast-changing e-commerce industry.
The team would gather ideas from PChome’s different operations, formulating more efficient and effective decisions that could respond to the fast-changing e-commerce industry, Jan said.
PChome Store’s revenue was NT$954.29 million in the first nine months of this year, plunging 22.56 percent annually from NT$1.32 billion the same period last year.
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