Krungsri Consumer reported its first-half 2026 results at a briefing covered by Marketing Oops on 10 August 2026, and one line in it should interest anyone selling online in Thailand: online platforms entered the top five card spending categories for the first time. Athis Rujirawat, who heads Krungsri Consumer, presented total card spending of 196,700 million baht for the half, up 3% on the same period a year earlier.
The category detail is where the behaviour shows. Online platforms grew 16% year on year, ranking fourth behind insurance, supermarkets and convenience stores, and petrol stations, and ahead of home decor and household goods. Alongside that, instalment purchases made online grew 242%.
The scope caveat, stated first because it changes how you read everything else
This is one issuer's card portfolio. Krungsri Consumer reported on its own accounts and its own cardholders, not on Thai consumers as a group. Nothing in the Marketing Oops report claims national coverage, and treating these figures as Thailand-wide consumer behaviour would be reading in something that is not there.
Two more absences are worth naming up front. The report gives no platform-level split, so there is no Shopee, Lazada or TikTok Shop breakdown anywhere in it. And it gives no offline comparison figure, so there is no way to say from this data whether online grew at the expense of physical retail or alongside it. Both limits are real, and both are easy to accidentally fill in with assumptions.
What Krungsri Consumer reported for the first half of 2026
The portfolio numbers presented at the briefing covered by Marketing Oops on 10 August 2026 are set out below.
| Metric | First half 2026 | Change year on year |
|---|---|---|
| Card spending | 196,700 million baht | Up 3% |
| New accounts | 284,100 | Up 4% |
| New credit extended | 47,200 million baht | Up 4% |
| Outstanding credit | 134,200 million baht | Down 1% |
| NPLs over 90 days | 1.1% credit cards, 1.9% personal loans | Not stated |
Spending up 3% while outstanding credit falls 1% is a portfolio that is being used more and carried less. That combination, together with the arrears rates quoted, is the backdrop against which the instalment numbers below should be read.
Online platforms reached the top five, and the neighbours are the story
Marketing Oops reported the top five spending categories in order as insurance, supermarkets and convenience stores, petrol stations, online platforms, and home decor and household goods. The growth ranking was separate: online platforms up 16%, mutual funds up 14%, beauty up 12%, sports and recreation up 10%, and petrol stations up 7%.
What makes fourth place meaningful is what sits around it. Insurance, groceries and fuel are the categories people spend on because life requires it. A category that reaches the same table is no longer a discretionary occasional purchase in that portfolio; it has moved into the routine. For a merchant, that reframes the competitive question. The rival for a share of a monthly card statement is not only another online seller, it is the weekly grocery run and the fuel bill.
What the ranking does not tell you
The ranking is by spending volume within one issuer's portfolio. It is not a market share statement, not a measure of how many Thai shoppers buy online, and not a claim about any individual platform. Marketing Oops reported the category, not its composition.
Instalments grew faster than spending, and that gap is the signal
The most useful pattern in the report is not any single growth rate. It is the gap between what people spent and how they chose to pay for it.
| Category | Spending growth | Instalment conversion growth |
|---|---|---|
| Travel | About 4% | 24% |
| Health and beauty | About 9% | 20% |
| Purchases made online | Not stated separately | 242% |
Marketing Oops reported that travel spending grew about 4% while requests to convert those transactions into instalment plans grew 24%, and that health and beauty card spending rose about 9% while instalment conversions on those purchases grew 20%. The report also listed the leading instalment items as goods bought online, insurance, and mobile and IT devices.
When instalment conversion grows several times faster than the spending it sits on, the demand did not go away and the ticket size did not shrink. What changed is the willingness to pay for it in one go. Read that as an affordability signal on discretionary purchases rather than as a demand signal, because it says something about cash flow rather than about desire.
What a marketer should actually change
The 242% figure on online instalments is the one with direct operational consequences, and there are four places it lands.
Product page and checkout messaging
If a meaningful share of buyers is converting a purchase to instalments after the fact, the monthly figure is doing work that the total price is not. Showing a per-month equivalent next to the price on the product page, rather than only surfacing instalment options at the final payment step, moves that information to the point where the decision is actually made. This is a merchandising change, not a discount.
Average order value strategy
Instalment availability changes what a shopper treats as an affordable basket. A bundle that looks expensive as a single charge can read as reasonable as a monthly figure. That is an argument for testing higher-value bundles and multi-item sets on the categories where the report showed instalment appetite, which in this portfolio were online goods, insurance, and mobile and IT devices.
Ad copy and landing page consistency
If the ad promises a monthly price, the landing page has to show the same monthly price above the fold. This is the most common avoidable leak in campaigns that lean on financing messages, and it applies equally to Google Ads and to paid social. Search copy and shopping feeds both have room for a price framing that matches the payment method the buyer intends to use.
Remarketing to instalment-inclined buyers
Buyers who have used instalments before are a different audience from buyers who have not. Segmenting them, where your own data allows it, lets the financing message go to the people it works on instead of to everyone. The report gives no demographic detail on who these buyers are, so build that segment from your own first-party data rather than assuming a profile.
What to measure after you change anything
Three things are worth instrumenting before you conclude the change worked. Track average order value on the pages where the monthly framing appears, against a period before it did. Track completed checkout rate on those same pages, since a financing message that raises basket size while lowering completion is a net loss. And track the mix of payment method at checkout, because the whole point is to find out whether the framing shifted behaviour or only shifted what buyers saw. None of these appear in the Krungsri Consumer report; they are the measurements that would tell you whether the pattern it describes exists in your own store. Setting that up properly is standard ecommerce marketing groundwork.
What this means for Thai marketers
The report is Thai data from a Thai issuer about Thai cardholders, so relevance is not the question here. The question is how far to generalise it, and the honest answer is: not very far on its own, but far enough to be worth acting on where it agrees with what you can see in your own numbers.
A merchant selling skincare, electronics or travel in Thailand can check the same pattern in a single afternoon. Look at whether your own average order value moved, whether instalment or buy-now-pay-later selection at checkout rose, and whether the categories where you saw it match the ones in the report. Agreement across an issuer's portfolio and your own store is much stronger evidence than either alone. Disagreement is also useful, because it tells you the pattern is not universal and your customers are behaving differently.
One thing not to do is to read a 3% overall spending increase as a weak market. The overall figure and the behavioural figures point in different directions here, and the behavioural ones are the more actionable. A portfolio growing 3% in total while online instalment usage grows 242% is describing a shift in how people pay, not a shift in how much they want.
FAQ
Is this Thailand-wide consumer data?
No. These are Krungsri Consumer's own portfolio figures for the first half of 2026, presented by Athis Rujirawat and reported by Marketing Oops on 10 August 2026. They describe one issuer's cardholders. The report makes no claim about the Thai population as a whole, and neither should anyone quoting it.
Which online platforms drove the 16% growth?
The report does not say. It gives the category "online platforms" without breaking it down, so there is no Shopee, Lazada or TikTok Shop split available from this source. Any platform-level number attached to these figures came from somewhere else.
Does 242% growth in online instalments mean people are struggling financially?
The report does not draw that conclusion, and the data does not settle it. What it shows is that spending continued while payment was spread out, with the arrears rate quoted at 1.1% for credit cards and 1.9% for personal loans. Preferring to preserve cash flow and being unable to pay are different things, and this data cannot tell them apart.
Do I need to add an instalment option to my store because of this?
Not on the strength of one issuer's report. What it justifies is checking your own checkout data for the same pattern before deciding. If instalment or split-payment selection is already rising in your store, the report supports moving that messaging earlier in the journey. If it is flat, the report is context rather than a mandate.
Did online spending grow at the expense of physical stores?
The report gives no offline comparison figure, so this cannot be answered from it. Supermarkets and convenience stores and petrol stations both remained in the top five spending categories, which is at least consistent with growth alongside rather than instead of physical retail, but that is inference and not something the source states.
Where to take this next
The full briefing coverage is on Marketing Oops. If the instalment pattern shows up in your own checkout data, the changes it points to are small and testable: a monthly figure on the product page, matching copy in the ads, and a segment for buyers who have financed before. If you want a second pair of eyes on whether your store is set up to take advantage of it, that is worth a conversation.
