The e-commerce market in Southeast Asia (Shopee, Lazada, Tiki…) is estimated to be worth over USD 238 billion by 2025, according to a study by Google and Temasek. With only 1 percent of total retail GMV generated online compared to 7.1 percent and 15.9 percent in the US and China, the region is still relatively young.
There is a fast-growing young & digital-savvy population of 158 million who spend approximately 19.4 hours online per week. Southeast Asia is the only truly ‘mobile-first’ region.
Together, both social e-commerce and mobile e-commerce are expanding, allowing foreign companies to join the SEA e-commerce market. There is an obvious trend that many businesses choose Shopee to start their business.
In this article, Omisell will go deeper into Shopee’s position and advantages to answer this question.
1. The overview of e-commerce marketplaces – Shopee
Shopee is a mobile-only marketplace that provides both users and retailers a fast, convenient, secure shopping, and selling experience.
This is one of the leading mobile e-commerce marketplaces in Southeast Asia and Taiwan.
Geographies it operates in are Indonesia, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore. It has traces of similarity to the Taobao model, in which buyers and sellers can communicate and transact directly. Shopee also unboxes opportunities for cross-border sellers from China and Hong Kong for selling to Southeast Asian and Taiwanese customers.
It offers a wide selection and variety of products, user-friendly interfaces, supported for integrated payments and seamless experience. Owing to the customized features, localization strategy, Shopee has successfully offered close and beneficial connections among buyers and sellers.
2. The ideal destination for business to enter
Shopee – the predominant e-commerce marketplaces in the whole SEA
As stated in the map of e-commerce reported by IPrice group, Shopee has been skyrocketing the entire SEA region over the last two years from 2019 to 2020 with substantial amounts of monthly user traffic.
Shopee recently concluded a successful 2019 that reinforced its status as the number one platform in Vietnam and the region. The company is the number one shopping app in Southeast Asia and Taiwan by monthly active users. About 80 million items sold during the12.12 birthday sale. Over 1 billion plays have been recorded on Shopee’s wide range of in-app games.
On the biggest sales event of the year, Shopee once again proved its dominant position by rolling out tremendous promotion events for the whole month. Consequently, Shopee has broken the record with enormous sales revenue. Therefore, Shopee has become the “golden” and “promising” destination for both regional and international businesses to join in.
Potential sales from the high traffic channel
It is obvious that one of the biggest competitive advantages of selling on Shopee platform is the scale of their online presence. These marketplaces have created a name and trust in people.
As reported in the Iprice group e-commerce report, Shopee drives around 60 million visitors a month, which is the highest number of online audiences any e-commerce platform can offer. For online bases, it is such an impossible mission to target and reach out to this number of online users. That’s Why this platform became a popular platform to enter.
Acquire new customers
Customers visiting this platform would not initially look for a particular shop for the first time but look for their wanted products. However, they would look for products that are available and listed in your store. Once you get a customer with the help of these giant online stores you can win the customer as a repeat buyer by giving them excellent service and fulfillment.
Promotional events and free shipping offer
Another key yet the competitive advantage of Shopee is offering various free ship coupon codes for customers.
In the growing world of the young generation, online shopping has become a phenomenon, nevertheless, young buyers spend much money on online shopping yet still prefer free shipping offers. Acknowledging the buying habits of customers, Shopee has constantly offered free ship extra codes. More or less, customers tend to grasp towards Shopee for the sake of free-ship.
Why this platform is more favoured by buyers over other competitors, another factor is due to the number of promotional events of Shopee within the year. Besides the biggest sales event, the Single day Sale 11.11 and 12.12, Shopee also carried out lots of individual discount offers due to the close collaboration with brands throughout the year. This provokes the customer’s curiosity to search for products on this platform monthly to find the best deal.
No commission fee
Shopee is known for a no-commission platform in which retailers can carry on business transactions without paying any extra or hidden fee for the system. That’s why this platform is an ideal place for any start-up retailer. No extra fee, no listing fee, no commission fee which means no financial burden. This lets retailers make big money on the platform. Though, enterprises can opt for native advertising and purchase paid ads at their own will.
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