Lazada aims to draw more first time e-commerce buyers

• Leading e-commerce platform prepared to handle expected surge in orders
• New 11.11 Super Show to attract more first time e-commerce users

LAZADA Malaysia is pulling out all the stops for this year’s Single’s Day sale with its Lazada 11.11 Shopping Festival and it will be doing so with shopping bonanzas that will happen both online and offline.

Lazada is expecting a large volume of sales from the upcoming 11.11 sale due to the fact that it has attracted five times more brands and sellers than last year, providing shoppers access to over 100 million products from over 300 brands.

Speaking to DNA after the launch of the shopping festival in Kuala Lumpur yesterday, Lazada chief executive officer Christophe Lejeune (pic, left) explains that this year’s 11.11 sale is expected to be the biggest day for e-commerce in Malaysia.

Lazada is well prepared for the popular sale day investing in its Lazada Express fleet heavily this year as it braces to meet the flood of orders on Nov 11. Part of the reason that Lazada has been investing in its own logistics fleet and warehouses is that he finds that courier companies in Malaysia have not invested enough.

But to Lejeune, logistics is but one of the key areas that Lazada has been investing in, post the additional US$2 billion (RM8.36 billion) Alibaba injected into it this past March. Lazada is also investing in its technology this year, overhauling the backend systems for its customer and seller apps. This is on top of implementing more personalisation features, the ability to chat with sellers and scan for QR codes.

Apart from that, Lazada has channelled the Alibaba investment towards customer acquisition activities such as big online campaigns throughout the year. But possibly its most ambitious plan to acquire new customers is in a special one-night-only show, the Lazada 11.11 Super Show that it is organising in partnership with Media Prima.

According to Lazada, the show will be staged at the Axiata Arena in Kuala Lumpur where a variety of local and international celebrities will be in attendance on Nov 10 at 10 pm. The show will be broadcast across multiple Media Prima channels including TV3, NTV7 and its online channel, Tonton. The show can also be seen on Lazada’s mobile app.

An estimated 7,000 people are expected to attend the show and for those at home, Lazada is incentivising them to tune in as they stand a chance win prizes that include two Volkswagen Beetle cars by playing live games via the app.

Lejeune explains that part of the objective of the show is to broaden Lazada’s audience to those who don’t typically shop online.

“Though Lazada has become a household name and one of the biggest e-commerce companies in Malaysia, there is still a lot of room for growth as e-commerce’s penetration is still low compared to other more advanced countries,” said Lejeune.

He does, however, note that compared to last year there are more secondary cities and non-urban users that are shopping on Lazada. In particular, there are younger shoppers coming online each year particularly from states like Kelantan, Sabah and Sarawak.

This spells good news for Lazada as the Internet-savvy shoppers are likely to use their mobile app more often.

Speaking of which, shoppers need not wait until 11.11 to get started with their shopping. From Nov 1, they can start previewing 11.11 prices and add those items to the cart so they can conveniently check them out on sale day.

Apart from that, a total of RM11 million worth of offers are up for grabs with deals as low as RM0.99 and up to RM200,000 worth of gifts.

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