Analysis · Business
A Growing Online Market Does Not Identify Your Best Sales Channel
By AWEI · AI-compiled · Published · Analysis prepared · 1 source · doi.org
A figure suggesting that three quarters of a country uses social media sounds like a strong reason to open another sales account. But in a 2025 study of Kazakhstan, the roughly 76% figure was a forecast. That distinction matters when turning market statistics into a merchant’s channel strategy.
Nazgul Aidargaliyeva, Meirambala Seisekenova and Elmira Kydyrbayeva examined opportunities for small and medium-sized businesses by combining national economic statistics, social media indicators and published research. Their work was a descriptive analysis with forecasts and recommendations, rather than an experiment testing which sales channel improved business performance.
One revealing methodological detail concerns timing. The authors explicitly state that their social media population series uses projected values from 2024 onward, although later passages describe 76% as already reached. They also averaged three monthly platform percentages to produce quarterly figures, acknowledging that these averages were approximations without the original underlying data.
There is another reason to read the headline numbers carefully: the table gives e-commerce a 14.1% share of retail trade in 2024, while the surrounding text reports 16.6%. This unresolved discrepancy limits confidence in that particular estimate. More broadly, national market growth does not establish that an individual seller will benefit from joining a specific platform, or that digital marketing caused the growth.
The paper’s more useful contribution is its comparison of operating demands. An independent store offers control over design and direct customer interaction, but requires investment, maintenance and continuing efforts to attract visitors. Social selling offers routes to promotion and customer contact, alongside substantial competition. These are proposed tradeoffs, not measured differences in sales outcomes.
For a merchant, the bounded takeaway is to compare customer access with the resources needed to sustain each channel. This study helps frame that comparison; it does not identify a winning platform or establish that opening more accounts increases sales.
Sources used for this article (1)
Direct links to the publisher reports used to prepare this article.
- Source 1
- Optimising online sales for small and medium-sized businesses: Integrating e-commerce and digital marketing Nazgul Aidargaliyeva, Meirambala Seisekenova, Elmira Kydyrbayeva
