Want to sell your products to Southeast Asia's over 650 million people? Read this guide on selling on Lazada, Shopee and other marketplaces.
Want to sell your products to Southeast Asia's over 650 million people? Consider selling on Southeast Asia's online marketplaces.
Many of the marketplaces do not charge a listing fee. Listing your products on them gives your brand greater reach and potential customers without significant marketing spend.
Back in June 2017, we looked at the amount of web traffic to some of the larger marketplaces in Southeast Asia (see below). Many of these websites have millions of visitors each month.
(Note that the chart above omits US marketplaces who are in Southeast Asia such as Ebay and Amazon. You'll want to consider these as well.)
The Southeast Asia market resembles a more nascent version of China, where large majority of ecommerce transactions take place on third-party marketplaces like Tmall, Taobao and Jingdong.
It is a common strategy for retailers and merchants to sell both on their own ecommerce websites, retail stores as well as on third-party marketplaces.
Marketplaces do, however, charge a fee upon the completion of a sale. To keep customers within their ecosystem, most of these marketplaces also prevent you from exporting customer emails and contact numbers (this is standard practice for all marketplaces).
The process for selling on these marketplaces is similar to that of your own ecommerce store.
The steps involved are as follows:
When you list on a marketplace, you will also have to extend your customer support functions to cover questions that might come from customers browsing the marketplaces.
Different marketplaces focus on different geographies, product and customer types.
Most of the time, merchants already have product names and descriptions in English. In this case, listing on marketplaces in English speaking countries first is a good way to test the waters. These would be Singapore, Malaysia and Philippines.
It is also a good idea to test your products on different marketplaces as their customer bases are different and your products could be more successful in certain marketplaces.
To help you to decide which marketplaces to consider listing on, here's a list of the popular marketplaces and what they focus on (in alphabetical order):
(Note: If you would like to be included or suggest an edit, please email us at hello@altitudelabs.com)
