Lazada Expands Its E-commerce Realm in Southeast Asia

Lazada, a Southeast Asian e-commerce platform owned by Alibaba Group, held a cross-border e-commerce conference on Mar. 7, and announced a series of cross-border business strategy upgrade initiatives.

Launched in 2012, Lazada is the number-one online shopping and selling destination in Southeast Asia – present in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Over the past three years, Lazada’s cross-border sales has quadrupled, and in hope to maintain this positive trend, the platform is now boosting its cross-border operations for international brands and merchants to expand their reach to consumers.

To boost sales in 2019, Lazada now aims to identify and nurture the top 300 brands among all cross-border sellers in each of the countries where Lazada operates. This will allow the specially selected brands to grow their business and enjoy benefits such as higher visibility of their products when users search and browse the site.

“We want to serve as that bridge between our quality cross-border merchants and some 560 million consumers in Southeast Asia,” Lazada Group’s Co-President Jing Yin, at the conference.

One of the key initiatives announced at the conference was a revamped Global Collection. It is a dedicated channel to showcase assortment by Lazada’s cross-border merchants from all around the world. Global Collection 2.0 taps on algorithm-based search functions to filter the wide cross-border assortment to spotlight sellers offering popular and good quality products so customers can find them easily.

With the new Global Collection, customers will get their parcels much faster, within 7 working days from the day they place their orders if they choose the standard shipping option.

Starting in April, cross-border sellers who are interested in joining Lazada no longer need an invite to sell their goods on the platform, but can submit applications in the self-service system. Once the review is completed, they can become Lazada merchants.

SEE ALSO: Alibaba Buys Daraz after Lazada, Now Covering 11 South East Asia Countries

Southeast Asia is one of the last major unclaimed e-commerce markets in the world. The region has the 3rd largest region population after China and India. It has great market prospects as the market size is expected to reach $102B in 2025, a 20 fold increase compared to 2015. Thus, it is not surprising that Lazada is not alone in showing interest in the South East Asian market. Competitor Shopee, which is part of Tencent, was the most downloaded shopping app in Southeast Asia in 2018 and attracted more monthly followers than Lazada in the last quarter of 2018.

But Co-President Jing Yin is not fazed by the competition and explains that he doesn’t see the need to focus on it, “instead we focus on what the market will look like five or ten years from now and where we should put our focus to adapt to it.” Yin said in an exclusive interview with Pandaily. He explained that Lazada “will continue to focus on empowerment and customer engagement” to ensure the quality of the service.

When asked about the company’s plans of expansion, Yin told Pandaily that Lazada wants to focus on the six markets at hand and have no plans of further expansion in the Southeast Asia region as of yet.

Featured photo credit to Alibaba