SINGAPORE — With an increasing number of small local players muscling in on the online shopping action in recent years, the e-commerce arm of Singapore Post is starting a new avenue to support these businesses in more ways — from receiving orders to providing a space to house their wares and shipping the goods.

Speaking on the sidelines of the launch of the Great Online Shopping Festival yesterday, Mr Marcelo Wesseler, SingPost’s eCommerce chief executive officer, said this service, to be launched in April, will offer small retailers a Web platform to receive orders, warehousing, and both local and overseas delivery to 220 destinations.

He told TODAY: “We have been very successful with the bigger retailers, but there has also been a lot of demand from small retailers. They need a simpler interface, which costs less.”

SingPost already has a wider suite of e-commerce services, which includes developing e-commerce sites with payment functions, warehousing, delivery and returns, customer service and digital marketing. Launched only two years ago, the service has garnered more than 1,000 retailers and brands as customers, Mr Wesseler said.

SingPost’s push into e-commerce coincides with the growing popularity of online shopping, both in Singapore and globally. In May last year, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding agreed to invest S$312.5 million for a 10.35 per cent stake in SingPost. Both parties also signed a memorandum of understanding that will allow them to explore the possibility of a joint venture in the area of international e-commerce logistics.

SingPost has invested more than S$100 million in infrastructure and service, Ms Patsie Tan, assistant vice-president of group communications at SingPost told TODAY in a Voices letter last week.

It has also spent S$45 million to replace sorting machines to handle the higher volume of packages and rolled out Singapore’s first automated parcel stations, giving customers 24/7 access to parcel collection, Ms Tan said.

In October last year, it announced that it would pump S$182 million into an e-commerce logistics hub that contains facilities to sort parcels as well as warehousing and loading bays.

At a panel discussion at the Google event yesterday, Mr Wesseler said businesses are facing more challenges from increasingly demanding consumers. “They now want to buy local and get the products (on the) same day or next day. That is one challenge that businesses face,” he said.

A White Paper published last year by payment solutions provider Payvision found that Singapore and Malaysia make up the largest e-commerce markets in South-east Asia, generating almost half of total online retail sales in this region. These two markets are expected to show double-digit growth in the next few years.

The size of the Singapore online shopping market reached S$1.1 billion in 2010 and is forecasted to hit S$4.4 billion this year, based on PayPal’s research.

A study by research firm TNS also showed that 41 per cent of Singaporeans who have never shopped online expect to do so in the next 12 months.

The Great Online Shopping Festival appears to be cashing in on this e-commerce boom. It rounds up more than 60 brands to offer discounts on a single web platform — http://gosf.sg — over three days from the stroke of midnight on Feb 2.

Organised by Internet services giant Google, the event is supported by SPRING Singapore — which curated some local retailers to participate in the event, as well as DBS Bank and SingPost.