This e-commerce platform with hundreds of millions of buyers has changed

Thanks to the hit romance TV series "Crash Landing on You", the famous Korean actor Hyun Bin has become a hot idol in many Southeast Asian countries. Recently, Southeast Asia's flagship e-commerce platform Lazada officially announced that Hyun Bin will serve as the first regional brand ambassador of LazMall.

Under the official announcement video posted on Lazada's official social account, Southeast Asian fans left comments saying "this is so cool". Even Hyun Bin's fans in China did not miss the news. Some said, "Hyun is very popular in Southeast Asia", and some even asked, "How can I use LazMall in mainland China?"

LazMall is not available in the mainland , but many Chinese cross-border merchants eager to expand into Southeast Asia can catch up with this favorable trend.

In addition to announcing new spokespersons to refresh users' eyes, Lazada has also undergone many changes on the merchant side this year. Many domestic cross-border merchants have reported that "Lazada feels a little different this year."

According to Alibaba 's latest financial report released in early August, Lazada's order volume increased by more than 90% year-on-year in the latest quarter ending June 30, 2021, maintaining a high growth trend. In addition, by the end of March this year, Lazada's annual active consumers had exceeded 100 million.

What did Lazada do to achieve rapid growth? Compared with the past, what is different about Lazada this year?

One-stop support, merchants' GMV increased 30 times in 60 days

The Southeast Asian e-commerce market has become a new blue ocean for cross-border e-commerce after the COVID-19 pandemic, but many sellers have previously struggled to find suitable channels to enter Southeast Asia.

Therefore, in early March this year, Lazada held its first investment promotion conference in Yiwu, introducing its one-stop solution for expanding into Southeast Asia to thousands of cross-border e-commerce sellers from across the country.

At the investment promotion conference that day, Lazada launched new merchant incubation and support mechanisms, including free cross-border shipping, free collection with low thresholds, 90-day commission exemption for new merchants, and additional exclusive traffic support.

In order to better serve merchants, Lazada has set up service centers in several major e-commerce industrial belts in China to provide face-to-face guidance to merchants and answer their questions. Industry clerks have also visited merchants in industrial belts such as Yiwu to collect the pain points encountered by merchants in actual operations and then propose targeted optimization solutions.

With Lazada's multiple exclusive supports, the business indicators of the first batch of strong cross-border merchants outperformed the market as a whole, and the GMV (gross merchandise volume) of the fastest-growing merchants increased nearly 30 times.

For example, AZDOME, a well-known dashcam manufacturer , previously focused on the European and American markets and has the largest dashcam production line in China in Dongguan, Guangdong. After joining Lazada's first batch of "Strong Merchant Growth Incentive Program", AZDOME received targeted suggestions from Lazada in store opening, product selection, market research, competitor analysis, and cross-border logistics and warehousing. Its GMV in May increased by 27.47% month-on-month, and in June, it increased by 42.94% month-on-month.

Overseas warehouses solve the pain points of cross-border e-commerce logistics

Anyone who does cross-border e-commerce knows that they are not afraid of the market not being big enough, the products not being good enough, or themselves not working hard enough; they are just afraid that the logistics pain points cannot be resolved.

At the investment promotion conference in March, Yi Qian, general manager of Lazada Group's cross-border business, said, "We only help Yiwu merchants with one thing, which is that after receiving the order, the merchant just needs to pack the package and hand it over to us, and Lazada will complete all the subsequent matters."

Since then, Lazada has announced many favorable policies: including joining hands with Cainiao to promote the full opening of central warehouses, overseas warehouses, and bonded warehouses, and reducing the order handling fees for central warehouses, etc., to help merchants save costs and improve logistics experience.

How important are overseas warehouses in improving logistics efficiency?

A household goods merchant in Yiwu once told the reporter: "If you want to do long-term cross-border business, you must deploy overseas warehouses, and the proportion must be high. Otherwise, your logistics costs will not be reduced, and how can you compare with others?" Another outdoor fishing gear merchant in Shenzhen directly concluded: "The significance of overseas warehouses to merchants is not the difference between 20% and 30%, but the difference between 0 and 1."

Since June, Lazada has teamed up with Cainiao to upgrade its warehouse network again and launched an intelligent replenishment system for overseas warehouses. Through the smart supply chain management system, it has created a new digital operation model for merchants. The system replaces manual work and Excel spreadsheets, and big data algorithms provide replenishment suggestions and accurate product recommendations, thereby helping merchants reduce costs and improve efficiency.

Live streaming sales boom in Southeast Asia

Among the rapid growth in Lazada’s order volume in the new fiscal quarter, the contribution of the new live streaming method cannot be ignored.

Since 2019, in response to the active pan-entertainment behavior on mobile terminals in the Southeast Asian consumer market, Lazada has vigorously promoted the "Shoppertainment" strategy, combining the content presentation of "live broadcast (LazLive) + game (LazGame) + picture and text sharing (Feed)" to embark on a differentiated competitive route of "entertainment sales, entertainment purchases, and entertainment sharing."

On March 27, the day of Lazada’s ninth anniversary, the number of merchants’ online live broadcasts increased by 180% year-on-year, and the transaction volume of “LazLive” increased by 670% year-on-year.

In Malaysia, where the Chinese language usage rate is high, LazLive launched the live streaming channel "Good Products from China" to showcase Chinese products and excellent cross-border brands to Malaysian consumers.

By early July, the cumulative number of viewers of the "Good Products in China" live broadcast had exceeded one million, with each live broadcast having 10-20 times the number of viewers of the store's daily live broadcasts and 4-5 times the number of fans gained from daily live broadcasts. A cross-border kitchenware merchant used the "Good Products in China" live broadcast, and the number of store visitors on the day of the live broadcast increased by more than 80% compared to the previous day, and the order conversion rate also increased by 100% accordingly.

In addition to highly immersive live broadcasts, Lazada also provides a simplified Chinese version of the app service to nearly a quarter of Chinese-speaking consumers in Malaysia. In the last week of June, the number of people using the Chinese version increased by 20%, and Lazada estimates that this figure will continue to rise in the future.

Not only that, in order to improve the conversion rate of cross-border products, Lazada's cross-border business team has joined hands with Alibaba Damo Academy to launch a small language image translation function, which can translate the Chinese/English in the picture into the local language of Southeast Asian countries.

At the same time, merchants can personalize text size, font, color, format, etc., so as to improve the display effect of product images, optimize the product information preview experience, and accelerate consumers' order decisions. According to incomplete statistics from Lazada, the conversion rate of products with localized language images is 5% higher than that of products with non-local language images.

As one of the important growth engines of Alibaba Group's globalization strategy, Lazada has grown into a leading and fast-growing flagship e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia.

With a population of 680 million and a booming Southeast Asian market, what changes will Lazada undergo in the coming period, and what surprises will it bring to merchants and consumers? It is worth looking forward to.

E-commerce platform

Lazada, GMV