Daily Tech Snippet: Friday December 26

Its a slow day, with not a lot going on, so here are 2 shallow-dives, one into Alibaba's M&A in 2014, and the other on Indonesia's eCommerce market, both courtesy of TechInAsia. 

• Indonesian ecommerce: 
• Online share of retail: This year, of the nation’s US$411.29 billion in retail spending, Indonesia saw an uptick to US$2.6 billion spent in ecommerce. 
• eCommerce Leaders: Lazada Indonesia, Rocket Internet’s answer to Amazon, made the jump to the top spot in 2014. SingPost reasons that Lazada took the lead because it made a shift away from consumer electronics and focused more on lifestyle goods. Lazada’s marketing campaigns in Bahasa Indonesia were also key wins for Rocket. 
• Market Potential: Last year, Indonesia clocked in at 74.8 million internet users. Last year, Indonesia had 4.6 million online shoppers. This year, it has 5.9 million. 20 percent of Indonesian online shoppers prefer conventional shopping sites like Lazada or Zalora, while 26.4 percent prefer social media like Facebook or Instagram. 26.6 percent prefer online forums or classified sites like Kaskus or OLX. 
• User Habits - social media: SingPost says that between January and March 2014, Twitter users in Jakarta posted 2.4 percent of the global total of 10.6 billion tweets during that time period, maintaining the city’s reign as the Twitter capital of the world. However, the nation’s most popular social media channel continues to be Facebook, with 69 million active users. As of September, Indonesia has 30 million Line users. Remarkably, nearly 27 percent of all the country’s ecommerce transactions occurred via social media in 2014. 
• User Habits - messaging: Surprisingly, the highest percentage of online shoppers in Indonesia would rather buy from messaging apps like Blackberry Messenger or Line. 
• Category Preferences: While Indonesians shop across multiple categories, the most popular one is by far clothing and apparel, with 61.7 percent of the nation’s online shoppers making a purchase in that category last year. Females reign supreme in the archipelago’s ecommerce space, with women having higher purchase rates, and the highest spending amount on clothing, mobile devices, travel items, laptops, and accessories. 
• Means of Payment: Bank transfers are the most popular way to pay for online transactions, followed by cash on delivery, and finally credit cards. Less than five percent of Indonesia’s population own credit cards, and credit card payments still account for less than 10 percent of all online transactions in the archipelago.

• Alibaba’s 2014 investments and acquisitions: List below - 33 transactions, known investments of about $5.3B (could be a lot higher, since about half these transactions are of unknown sizes)