Continuing our Marketplaces 2018 series, today we look at Lazada. To find a full list of marketplaces we’ve written about already, visit our Marketplaces 2018 page here.
Web address: Lazada.com
Marketplace Overview
Lazada is the leading shopping and selling destination in Southeast Asia with dedicated marketplaces in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. It claims to host more than 155,000 local and international sellers as well as 3,000 brands serving the 560 million consumers in the region. It was founded in 2012, offers over 300 million SKUs to shoppers and is owned by Alibaba. It’s keen to attract sellers from outside of the region and that offers an opportunity to international merchants.
In April this year Alibaba announced that they would be increasing investment in the company with a $2bn injection of funds to fuel growth.
Seller registration and requirements
You can apply to start selling online and it’s good to know that Lazada has dedicated here in the UK that can help. Registration is free. There are no monthly or listing fees: sellers are charged commissions only when they make a sale. Commissions depend on the product category, ranging from 3% to 12%, including payment fees.
There’s a whole host of information and instruction on selling into the Lazada marketplace in their ‘University’ section, which you can find here.
Product listings and fulfilment
As with other marketplaces of its type, you administer your own listings and high quality photography of your products is particularly important. It offers management tools of inventory in its Seller Center. You can upload products in a variety of ways including single and mass uploads and an API for bulk volumes. Some familiar third-party marketplace tools are already integrated, including Neteven.
International sellers are required to use the LGS (Lazada Global Shipping) service for order fulfilment. But how you get your consignments into the LGS service is up to you. Merchants can use any delivery service to transport goods to a Lazada Sortation Center. Payments are dealt with by the marketplace and disbursed to you. One of the benefits of this is you can more easily take payments in locally accepted methods including cash on delivery. That’s commonplace in many parts the world and wouldn’t otherwise be available using European couriers.
Tamebay’s take on Lazada
There’s a lot to like about Lazada, it has an enviable reach and reputation in a region of the world that is enjoying significant ecommerce growth and it’s very much in the lead as a marketplace in the area. But it also offers difficulties including language. Your decision to start selling there will depend on the products you sell and margins.
As a merchant, your first step must be to assess the opportunity of the marketplace, work out whether your products are a good fit and will offer profit and a respectable margin and then text the waters with some experimental lines. But the anecdotal evidence suggests it could be a hard nut to crack.
