Exploding sales! Live e-commerce drives a surge in sellers’ orders

Beyond national borders, Double 11 is triggering more sales.

The traditional domestic promotion festival "Double 11" carries a unique consumer culture charm and is stimulating stronger sales momentum in Southeast Asia. During this period, a number of e-commerce platforms performed well, among which TikTok Shop performed the most eye-catchingly, with a large number of merchants receiving explosive orders on the platform.

TikTok Shop has performed strongly in the Southeast Asian market. From a cultural perspective, Southeast Asia and China are close neighbors, with similar people and cultures. The live e-commerce business model has been well proven in China. The rich experience and mature operation strategies accumulated by many merchants and service providers in China provide a blueprint for their expansion into the Southeast Asian market.

At present, a phenomenon has become clearly visible: a group of merchants are using live streaming e-commerce as a fulcrum to expand their territory in the Southeast Asian market and bring new growth to cross-border business.

Live streaming e-commerce is powerful, with 80,000 orders in one show

The Southeast Asia Digital Economy Report 2024 jointly released by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company recently shows that the digital economy in Southeast Asia will grow by 15% year-on-year in 2024, reaching a total scale of US$263 billion. Among them, e-commerce is the pillar industry in Southeast Asia's digital economy, and its scale is expected to reach US$159 billion this year, a 15% increase over the previous year.

Livestreaming has been an important driving force in the booming e-commerce in Southeast Asia. As the leader of livestreaming e-commerce in Southeast Asia, TikTok Shop has delivered amazing results in every major promotion. This year’s Double 11 is no exception.

In the Malaysian market, TikTok Shop held a live broadcast event called "11.11 Mega LIVE Showdown". With the popularity of the Double 11 festival and a variety of promotional offers, this live broadcast attracted more than 5 million Malaysians to watch in just four hours, and a total of 80,000 orders were received during the event.

During the Double 11 live broadcast on TikTok Shop, many outstanding creators such as @khairulaming and @yang actively participated. In addition, the platform provided consumers with discounts on products from multiple brands, with the highest discount reaching 80%, laying the foundation for attracting traffic and boosting merchants' orders.

Photo: Southeast Asian talent is live streaming

The explosive sales in the Malaysian West Coast market during the Double 11 shopping festival is just a microcosm of the rapid growth of live streaming e-commerce in the Southeast Asian market of TikTok Shop. As the platform's sales data exploded, a group of cross-border merchants grew rapidly in Southeast Asia through TikTok Shop.

It has been less than a year since Shenzhen 3C brand Ugreen entered the TikTok Shop Southeast Asian market. During this year's Double 11, its store traffic and order volume showed an astonishing explosion, with the growth coefficient increasing by 5 times compared to usual days.

On the day of the Double 11 promotion, Ugreen teamed up with a local Vietnamese celebrity @hakat6688, who has about 3 million fans, to start a live broadcast. Amazingly, more than 1,000 magnetic power banks were successfully sold in just 9 minutes. Different from the situation that the conventional consumer group of electronic products is mostly male, the main force of orders this time is young women aged 20 to 35.

Image: Ugreen magnetic power bank

At the beginning of establishing contact with the influencer, Ugreen accurately selected and recommended several products based on the characteristics of the influencer's fans. As the brand keenly captured the significant characteristics of Southeast Asian consumer groups, such as relatively open and extroverted personalities and strong demand for colorful products, it finally reached a consensus with the influencer and successfully promoted the rapid sales of the Wangpai Cream series of magnetic power banks in a short period of time.

At present, the emerging market of Southeast Asia is being swept by the wave of live e-commerce. More and more consumers are willing to accept and get used to this new shopping model that combines unique interactivity and immediacy. Under the strong guidance of this strong consumption trend, live e-commerce has shown a booming and flourishing scene in Southeast Asian markets such as Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines.

Platforms, influencers and merchants work together to accelerate brand growth

Ugreen is just one of the many beneficiaries of the booming live e-commerce in Southeast Asia. The reason why it can achieve such excellent results is due to its thorough preparation and careful layout behind the scenes.

Ugreen sells its products in five Southeast Asian countries through TikTok Shop. Based on market conditions, it cooperates with influencers with many female fans to expand its user base and increase stickiness. It controls the quality-price ratio with efficient after-sales service. Although it started late, it is steadily moving towards success.

Merchants’ success depends on standing on the shoulders of the platform. Compared with other platforms, TikTok Shop uses live streaming as its entry point to make shopping interactive and participatory. The platform has invested a lot of resources to provide more tools and resources to influencers and merchants in the Southeast Asian market. At the same time, it has explored mature TikTok Shop live streaming e-commerce cases, and brought more methodologies to merchants through merchant universities, regular exchange meetings, and other means.

Many TikTok Shop Southeast Asian cross-border merchants lamented: "Thanks to TikTok Shop's all-round construction and promotion of the Southeast Asian live e-commerce ecosystem, as the live broadcast-related infrastructure has become more complete, the difficulty of entry has continued to decrease, and the gameplay has been constantly updated, in more than a year, it has achieved a leap from zero foundation to monthly sales of millions of dollars."

Third-party data shows that in 2023, the total e-commerce transaction volume of TikTok Shop in Southeast Asia has reached approximately US$16.3 billion, an increase of more than 27 times compared to 2021, making it the fastest growing e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia, of which live streaming is definitely an important driving force.

Merchants such as Ugreen can visually perceive the growth charm brought by TikTok Shop promotion nodes. Under the condition of stable operation, the growth brought by big promotions can be gradually converted into daily data, promoting the accelerated growth of the brand in the Southeast Asian market.

New opportunities for overtaking on the curve that cannot be ignored

According to the 2024 Southeast Asian E-commerce Market Insight Report, the growth rate of e-commerce in Southeast Asia reached 18.6%, ranking first in the world. The Internet penetration rate in Southeast Asia is as high as 70%, especially in countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. The increase in the number of Internet users has directly promoted the expansion of the e-commerce market.

At the same time, the Econsultancy report also shows that 85% of social media shoppers in Southeast Asia believe that shopping through social media is "quick and easy", and 84% of respondents said they would buy more goods on social media in the next few years. This shows that using live e-commerce to expand the Southeast Asian market is a very wise choice.

Overall, there are many young people in Southeast Asia who are open to online shopping and are willing to spend for their own interests. Multiple factors have jointly promoted the booming live streaming e-commerce in Southeast Asia. Specifically, merchants have many advantages in live streaming in Southeast Asia:

First, merchants have to invest less. Compared with other markets, the Southeast Asian market has lower costs. The Southeast Asian market is relatively open, and the economy is in an upward period. The consumption capacity of local people has been rising, and their willingness to consume is also higher. Several Southeast Asian countries are close to China, and the cultural and aesthetic differences are relatively small, so it is easier for merchants to grasp the needs of consumers.

Secondly, Southeast Asia is no longer a low-unit-price market. In the current market situation, many high-unit-price products also show strong sales potential. For example, mobile power banks priced at more than US$50 will also sell well. On the one hand, this reflects that consumers have a demand for high-quality, high-value products and have the corresponding consumption capacity. On the other hand, it also shows that consumers' recognition of brand products is constantly increasing. After years of development of the e-commerce industry and consumer education, Southeast Asian consumer groups have significantly improved their trust in e-commerce.

Thirdly, it is easier to build an influencer matrix and trigger a flywheel effect. By cooperating with influencers, brands can present product information, usage methods, advantages, etc. to target users in the form of short videos or live broadcasts. At the same time, influencers' fan groups often have high purchasing power and willingness to consume. Marketing and promotion through the influencer matrix can achieve rapid sales growth. In addition, many influencers in Southeast Asia are highly cooperative and flexible, willing to try new cooperation models, and actively cooperate with sellers' marketing needs.

Finally, the platform has rich gameplay and can achieve instant explosion. TikTok's traffic has already firmly occupied the top 1. In a huge traffic pool, influencers can get the most exposure. Video live broadcasts are short, flat and fast. Compared with traditional shelf e-commerce, the platform has rich gameplay, including live broadcasts and influencers. Live broadcasts are divided into many different types and forms. There are also many ways to play in the influencer live broadcast room, such as lucky bags, free gifts, and giveaways. These can promote the strong development of TikTok Shop's Southeast Asian live broadcast ecosystem.

For cross-border merchants, the importance of deploying in Southeast Asia, the fastest growing e-commerce market in the world, is self-evident. Live streaming by influencers is becoming the biggest driving force for e-commerce growth in Southeast Asia. This model is also a new opportunity for cross-border merchants to overtake others, and will become the key for more Chinese brands to open up the Southeast Asian market in the future.  

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