How Shopee Becomes the top eCommerce marketplace for southeast Asia

14/01/2022

Contributed by: Tripadvisor author

In 2015, Shopee was established 2015 by the parent firm Sea Limited as a social-first mobile-driven market. Although it was a latecomer to the market, it has grown to establish itself as the top eCommerce marketplace in SEA in only five years. According to Shopee chief commercial Zhou Junjie, Shopee's chief commercial officer Zhou Junjie, being late to the market wasn't a detriment at all. They were able to observe the market with keen eyes and identify any trends or areas they could enhance that current players weren't addressing.

Presently, Shopee dominates all six countries of the SEA eCommerce and has reports claiming its success worldwide as the app with the highest number of monthly active users, the most number of downloads total, and websites that receive the highest number of visits on both mobile and desktop web. What vital strategic elements triggered Shopee's rise from a fledgling business idea to a regional giant? You can use the App Store Optimization service from Asoservice.com to increase app ranking for shopping apps faster.

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Mobile-first Initiative

Shopee quickly discovered that its future was mobile and reached out to this online audience through the launch of the Shopee application, first rather than its website, which reaches the mobile market.

They saw this growing trend as the best option for the future of eCommerce in the region. They believe that shopping online should evolve to be the specific needs of younger consumers who grew up talking with others, sharing their ideas, and enjoying themselves using mobile devices. This strategy will allow Shopee to benefit from the anticipated growth of mobile use.

Shopee: The revolutionary mobile-first social marketplace, Source: Youtube, Shopee Singapore

Shopee continues to show strong growth as the company recorded a 40 percent increase in the duration of its users' in-app week in the last. In the Indonesian market, it recorded more than 430 million transactions during the quarter-end of 2020 an average of 4.7 million transactions. Apart from SEA regions, the app was also first in Taiwan and is the 3rd most downloaded application in shopping. This demonstrates the firm's capability to offer more than simple transaction-based shopping. Buy App Store Optimization services from Asoservice.com will increase app ranking faster at the cheapest price for Shopping apps.

Localization

Shopee adheres to a customer-first ethos and has succeeded in providing a personalized online experience to their customers with friendly and professional purchasing and selling environments. This is one of the advantages that differentiate Shopee which includes unique aspects of language, culture, and marketing strategies within their business operations for every market.

To increase brand loyalty and deliver memorable experiences for customers, Shopee concentrates on understanding the market and user behavior by utilizing a variety of localized and hyper-localized actions. Local offices and teams operate across all the needs, intending to showcase different categories of products and campaigns by what appeals to the consumer. The company also has partnered with local logistics and banks to run their business in each country to respond to the needs. Within Malaysia, in the Malaysian marketplace, Shopee recognized one of the significant issues facing users in their purchase - the local shipping cost and addressed the over-inflated shipping costs by offering sellers the option of free shipping in Malaysia for products that weigh up to 5kg.

Localization

Localization of Shopee, Source: Proreviewsapp

In terms of user engagement, an efficient localization strategy used by Shopee is to make every market have celebrities as influencers, endorsements, and ambassadors that are well-known in the respective country and for which consumers are the most open. In the Philippines, the most recent ambassador was the famous Filipino musician and singer Jose Mari Chan, renowned for his carols for Christmas. This is perfect to represent a country with one of the largest Christmas festivities. The campaign was announced at the beginning of Christmas in the country in September 2020. In the same way, in some other countries like Thailand, where consumers are seen to prefer people of mixed race, the Vietnamese market is known for its campaigns featuring famous faces from music, films, and comedy. In this year's market, Shopee Indonesia is launching a new promotion known as the "Big Ramadan Sale," an all-month-long sale that includes various deals that meet the customer's requirements during Ramadan. App developers can buy ASO services from the Top 1 Agency, Asoservice.com to increase app ranking for their Android, and iOS apps, and games.

Discounts

Instead of focusing solely on advertising, Shopee managed to capture customers with various promotions, offering advertisements ranging from discounts, and free shipping to flash sales that are available throughout the year.

The awaited annual Singles Day, or 11.11, showed how Shopee's sales strategy continues to dominate the market, as it topped all six countries within the region on the shopping day. The marketplace saw 200 million products sold within a single day. The push for promotions in each market is evolving into more innovative, establishing deals, and attracting customers. For Malaysia, Shopee focused on various population segments through its app on February 20, 2020. Shopee Malaysia launched a men's sale option when the platform noticed that women buy items for entertainment while men are focused on more expensive items. There has been a rise in male customers purchasing smartphones, laptops, and other appliances.

Shopee Voucher Add Trick, Source: Youtube, Online Tricks

Shopee has also introduced the concept of an interactivity-based marketing approach dubbed "Shoppertainment" to boost user engagement and traffic to the platform. The feature includes live events, interactive games in-app, and Livestream events generally hosted by local influencers. They also offer prizes to viewers like Shopee coins or merchandise from the participating brands. The live streaming feature is available in Singapore; Shopee has reported that users spend 40 percent more time on the app and watch live streams from sellers and brands, growing by 40 times, while in the region, it was up by 70 times. Indonesia also witnessed an increase in the use of live streaming during the 2nd quarter of 2019, averaging 30 million hours of viewing. In-app games have also risen in the second quarter of 2020, with Singaporean gamers using 60 million games and players in Indonesia using 10 billion matches.

What's the next step in store for Shopee?

The efficacy of Shopee creating a customized marketing strategy for each market has seen international and local success that even the previous top regional platform, Lazada, is now revamping its system.

What's the next step in store for Shopee?, Source: Proreviewsapp

As the eCommerce trend continues to gain momentum, Shopee aims to ensure that more companies can be digitally transformed and benefit from the expanding opportunities within the Asia-Pacific region. Shopee also announced their expectations for 2021 in Indonesia and the Philippines. Philippine and Indonesian markets: increase in the use of digital payments as well as the positioning of logistics at the forefront and the development of novel strategies to sell products and services by both sellers and brands.

Conclusion

Based on Shopee's own experiences, we can conclude that creative strategies and thinking are required to stay ahead of the changing patterns in the behavior of consumers. This should be a constant effort to retain customers. The standard of a satisfying experience set by Shopee will change the face of Asian eCommerce and is worth waiting to discover what other platforms have to offer to compete with Shopee's success. The best method to increase app ranking, you can buy App Store Optimization service for the Shopee app.

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Hope this article is helpful to you, thanks for reading.

Source: https://proreviewsapp.com/