LazadaPH: Running their competition by a mile

It was only last year when Lazada was launched in the country. It is supported by Rocket Internet and is owned by the Samwer brothers. It is now only available in the Philippines but also in key countries of South East Asia. They wanted to penetrate the market of South East Asia in Ecommerce. They have already built a reputation as a huge website incubators in the world. It's actually not new for other countries to conduct online shopping. The industry in Ecommerce was still raw before they were launched in the country. One reason why Ecommerce was slow is because there are only a few who can purchase online. Only a few have acceptable Internet speed. Credit card owners are quite few in the country. This is mainly the conventional payment method that is acceptable in online. Customers who pay thru credit cards are the most acceptable among the other online payments. In my own opinion, Cash on Delivery alternative payment method helped improve Ecommerce in the country since it allows the untapped market to become online customers. We are now currently seeing a lot of successful offline business being present in online.

Now that Lazada has showed local businessmen the potential of online business, they followed quickly. Ecommerce was never highly regarded initially as most of them failed to penetrate the local market. Despite having some possible online shoppers among the bunch, it didn't help since they don't feel comfortable in online payment. For the few who can conduct online shopping, not all of them are open to that idea. It made it difficult for Ecommerce to grow as how it should be. It was local online classifieds who initially left an imprint in the local online scene. In the local online community, local online malls were never given attention as compared to local online classifieds in the past.

It's actually logical for them since there's not too much investor is thrilled in entering the online shopping industry. Since this was the situation when this online mall arrived, they countered it with full blown online marketing. No matter where you went in online, their brand presence was felt. Local online browsers quickly caught up their brand. That gives them an edge over their competitors is that they offer full online shopping package to their customers.

They offered an alternative payment method called Cash on Delivery or C.O.D. payment methods comes with Free Delivery Availability as well. Customers will still get manufacturer's warranty that is also issued by traditional malls. Just recently, they opened credit card installment payments to their customers. As of this time, they are currently opening it to BDO account holders. However, I’m pretty confident that in due time they will open it to other banks as well. They even tied up with MegaLink just this month. This just shows how they continue to look for ways to service their customers on a higher level. It’s actually rare to see this kind of online mall that is driven to further improve their business.