Taiwan's E-Commerce and Digital Payments: Three Trade Wars on One Island

30-second overview: In 2007, Jan Hung-tze staked everything on "24-hour island-wide delivery," and PChome's stock price soared to NT$537. Eight years later, Shopee arrived from Singapore with NT$3 billion in subsidies and PChome began its collapse. Ten years after that, South Korea's Coupang landed with even more aggressive Rocket Delivery. Meanwhile, Taiwanese wallets quietly disappeared — digital payment users surpassed 34 million, with QR codes turning up even at oyster omelet stalls in night markets. Every trade war on this island has rewritten the way people shop and pay.

One Gamble: 24-Hour Delivery

In 2007, the standard process for online shopping in Taiwan was: place an order, wait three to seven days, receive your package. Consumers had long since accepted this as normal.

Jan Hung-tze did not believe in it. A man from the publishing world, he founded PChome Online in 1996, building from internet magazine to e-commerce. When PChome's online shopping went live in 2000, Taiwan's e-commerce sector was still using a "relay model" — websites took orders, suppliers shipped, and no one managed logistics in between. Jan saw a simple problem: if you cannot control someone else's warehouse, you cannot control speed.¹

So he made a decision that looked insane at the time: build his own warehousing, and promise island-wide 24-hour delivery. Not "we'll try our best" — a guarantee. Late deliveries meant a refund. To make this happen, PChome developed its own merchandise management system, built logistics centers, and handled everything from inventory to dispatch entirely in-house.²

The gamble paid off. 24-hour delivery became PChome's moat. In 2015, PChome's stock hit an all-time high of NT$537, with earnings per share of NT$8.24 — the undisputed king of Taiwanese e-commerce.³

But on the other side of the moat, someone was digging a tunnel.

The NT$3 Billion Invader

In October 2015, Singapore's Sea Group (formerly Garena) launched Shopee in Taiwan. Its first move was not advertising — it was burning money. Zero listing fees for sellers, free shipping for buyers.

Taiwan's e-commerce world initially dismissed it. Free shipping? That won't last.

They underestimated the depth of Sea Group's pockets. Shopee's subsidies were not a trial balloon — they were a comprehensive flood. Outside estimates suggest Shopee burned through more than NT$3 billion in that campaign. Not to make money, but to change consumer behavior — to make "free shipping" transition from a pleasant surprise to an expectation, and to make any platform without free shipping look like it was charging a tax.⁴

It was not until January 2017 that Jan Hung-tze grasped the logic. He later admitted in a speech: "I thought and thought, and there is really no such thing as defense — only offense. Because being on offense is a better position than being on defense."⁵

But PChome's offense came too slowly. Shopee captured young users with a gamified interface, enabled real-time buyer-seller communication through a chat function, and created entertainment-driven shopping experiences through live streaming. These were not PChome's strengths. Jan himself admitted: "I came to understand the power of capital too late."⁶

Curator's note: The Shopee vs. PChome story is essentially a familiar script in Taiwan's technology industry: a domestic pioneer builds an advantage through innovation, then foreign capital and scale reverse the outcome. The same play was staged thirty years ago in physical retail — when 7-Eleven, Carrefour, and Costco entered Taiwan, traditional grocery stores thought they were irreplaceable too.

The Quiet Winner

While everyone was watching the PChome-Shopee war, momo was doing something unsexy but supremely important: building warehouses.

Fubon Media Technology (momo's parent company) started in TV shopping and entered internet e-commerce in 2005. It had none of PChome's pioneer cachet, none of Shopee's subsidy firepower. But it had one thing: the capital backing of Fubon Group, and a strategy bordering on obsessive about logistics.

momo has cumulatively invested more than NT$14 billion across Taiwan to build more than 50 logistics centers of various sizes — the only e-commerce operator in Taiwan that handles everything from land acquisition and warehouse construction to internal systems entirely in-house.⁷ This sounds like sheer labor, but the results are stunning: in 2024, momo's full-year consolidated revenue reached NT$112.56 billion, a new record high, and it sits firmly in first place among Taiwan's B2C e-commerce operators.⁸

momo's story demonstrates one thing: in the e-commerce wars, the one still standing in the end is usually not the one best at slogans, but the one best at moving boxes. Logistics is not just a cost — it is a wall.

The Third Wave: Rockets from Korea

In 2022, South Korean e-commerce giant Coupang landed in Taiwan.

Coupang's founder, Bom Kim, is a Korean-American who dropped out of Harvard to start a company, transplanting the "Amazon model" to Korea and using self-built logistics to achieve next-day delivery for 99% of orders nationwide in South Korea. Now he wanted to replicate the same approach in Taiwan: Rocket Delivery.⁹

In March 2026, Coupang activated its fourth logistics center in Taoyuan, bringing Rocket Delivery coverage to approximately 70% of Taiwan.¹⁰ Its strategy is as blunt as Shopee's was ten years earlier: take losses now to capture market share. First-purchase discounts of 30%, direct cross-border shipping, and everyday items like diapers priced below market — industry insiders estimate Coupang has already captured a 20% market share in the diaper category.

In Q3 2025, Sea Group's financial results showed revenue from the international market including Taiwan of US$1.287 billion, up 32% year-on-year, but Coupang's growth rate in Taiwan is three digits.¹¹ Bom Kim said at an analyst call that Taiwanese consumer behavior patterns "closely resemble the early development trajectory of our Korean retail business." Translated: there is still a lot of meat to be had here.

Did you know? In October 2024, Uni-President Group announced a stake in PChome, acquiring a 30% share and becoming the largest institutional shareholder. The former king of physical retail has now absorbed the former king of e-commerce. Jan Hung-tze said at the shareholders' meeting: "The stock price has finally given us back a little justice." Behind those words is nine years of decline from NT$537 to less than NT$100 per share.

The Disappearing Wallet

The e-commerce wars have been thunderous, but the revolution in how Taiwanese people pay has been equally dramatic — just quieter.

In 2020, Taiwan's digital payment users surpassed the 10-million mark. Five years later, in 2025, that figure had rocketed to 34 million.¹² Taiwan's total population is only 23.4 million — the reason the number exceeds the population is that the average person holds 1.5 digital payment accounts.

The three major players each have distinct approaches. iPASS MONEY, backed by its transit card foundation plus LINE Pay's social media traffic, holds first place with 6.98 million users. Jkopay (街口支付) follows the "street vendor route," penetrating night markets and traditional markets, and ranks second with 6.93 million users. PX Pay, backed by PX Mart's more than 1,000 brick-and-mortar locations nationwide, ranks third with 6.21 million users.¹³

The real wildcard appeared in 2025: LINE Pay upgraded from "mobile payment" to full "electronic payment" status and entered the contest as an independent operator. Its July monthly revenue of NT$640 million was up 25% year-on-year, a new record high.¹⁴ A new free-for-all is underway.

The QR Code at the Oyster Omelet Stall

The numbers look impressive, but what does the real payment revolution actually look like?

Walk into any night market in Taiwan and you will see the TWQR (Taiwan Unified QR Code standard) placard posted at nearly every stall. Installation rates are 99%. But look closer — some vendors have the QR code tucked in a corner, or even facing the wall. The owner will tell you: "Cash is faster."¹⁵

The reason is straightforward. Digital payments mean every transaction is recorded, and records mean tax reporting. For traditional vendors who have long operated in cash, "convenience" and "transparency" are two sides of the same coin. The government offers a tax incentive to address this: small-scale operators who use electronic payment see their business tax rate drop from 5% to 1%. But changing behavior is harder than changing policy.

✦ "Night market installation rate 99%, actual usage rate far below that number. The fate of a QR code hangs on whether the vendor is willing to flip it around."

The trend is nonetheless irreversible. The latest surveys show that 84% of Taiwanese people frequently use mobile payment, and in small transactions under NT$50, the share choosing mobile payment (46%) has already surpassed the share choosing cash (42%). An oyster omelet at NT$60 sits right at that inflection point.

The Twenty-Year Cycle

Looking back, the twenty years of Taiwanese e-commerce and digital payments is a cycle of constant disruption.

In the 2000s, PChome used 24-hour delivery to define "fast." In the 2010s, Shopee used free shipping to define "cheap." In the 2020s, momo used self-built logistics to define "reliable," while Coupang is trying to redefine "fast" all over again. Every round's winner thought they had found their moat; every next round's invader found a way around it.

The payment side is the same story. From cash-on-delivery to credit cards, to LINE Pay QR scanning, to TWQR one-code-everywhere — every "convenience" upgrade made the previous generation's "convenience" look clunky.

In December 2024, Uni-President Group took a stake in PChome. The company that used 7-Eleven to transform Taiwanese retail is now coming to reshape Taiwanese e-commerce. Thirty years ago, traditional grocery stores were displaced by convenience stores. Now the convenience store owner has come to mop up after e-commerce.

The trade wars on this island will not stop. Every new QR code, every new logistics center, every new wave of subsidies is answering the same question: who can make 23 million people reach for their wallets one second faster?

Further reading:

• Taiwan's Fintech Development — Pure internet banks, open banking to regulatory sandboxes: the full picture of the financial sector's digital transformation
• Taiwan's 5G Network Construction and Digital Transformation — How 5G infrastructure is changing logistics tracking, live-stream shopping, and smart retail
• Taiwan's Software Industry Development — From OEM to proprietary brands: how the software sector supports the technical underpinning of e-commerce platforms
• Semiconductor Industry — Where the chips come from that underpin digital payments and e-commerce infrastructure

References