Payments lie at the heart of the ecommerce revolution

Ecommerce is a global economic powerhouse and one of the areas of development that its growth is driving is a revolution in payments. While developed markets are awash with card payments, the real ecommerce growth is to be found in evolving and emerging markets and here we find that alt.payments – including carrier billing –?are in the driving seat.

Research by Juniper Research rch into the rise of digital goods ecommerce worldwide finds that the volume of ecommerce payments for digital goods is set to reach 188 billion by 2029, up from 87 billion in 2024 generating a staggering $11.4trn, up from $7trn this year.

This enormous 63% growth is being driven by the growth in emerging markets, such as India and Brazil. A prime contributing factor to this global growth lies in growing infrastructural investments driving users’ access to ecommerce platforms.

It is also rooted in the roll out of alternative payment methods that embrace both card payments and go way beyond them. In short, the ecommerce revolution –?particularly in emergent and evolving markets –?is both driving and being driven by how people pay.

While the developed world sees ecommerce growing at 8.4% a year between 2023 and 2024, accounting for 20% of all retail sales, in emerging markets, ecommerce is growing at more like 20% a year, albeit from a smaller base.

A lot of this growth is coming from Asia, where internet penetration is set to hit 94% in 2025 and where a number of markets – the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia in particular –?are really exploding.

But it is across India, North Africa and parts of the Middle East, where the real potential lies. These markets are only now ‘coming up’ and, with the exception of India, are yet to truly see an ecommerce explosion. Here, infrastructure is starting to expand and internet penetration is rising. However, it is the development of alt.payments that is going to really make it take off.

In the Middle East, carrier billing has brought about the start of the digital commerce revolution, making it relatively easy for consumers to start to consume content and services on their mobiles without having to have a bank account. Likewise, service providers and content providers have also managed to rapidly create a market for these services off the back of this ease of payment.

This is only likely to continue in the years ahead –?only it will see more than just carrier billing underpinning it. Instead, mobile wallet use will start to emerge –?even for topping up carrier billing on pre-paid –?along with novel fintech products that allow users to leverage the cash economies found in these markets and make them digital.

Whether they ultimately also embrace cards remains to be seen, but what is interesting is that for content and service providers looking to target these markets are starting to search for ways to deliver a vast range of payment tools to customers in multiple regions, allowing providers to target many different markets at once. Such payment orchestration platforms are soon going to be the bedrock of telemedia services.