E-Commerce in Thailand: Expert Strategies for Shopee, Lazada & TikTok Shop Success

[00:00:00] Kelly: I think the biggest misconception is that you open an online store and you will get orders from day one. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that.They make it very easy to join the platform, which is very beneficial for Shopee and Lazada because they will have more active users.

[00:00:18] They don’t really care so much about you. They just care about the product that brings them conversions.

[00:00:24] So you really have to not only work for yourself, you also have to work for the platforms. And you get zero love back if you don’t do that.

[00:00:32] Scott: All right, welcome. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Kelly Hazemans. Now we met a few months prior, and since Kelly has a lot of, great experiences and we had a lot of great discussions, I thought she’d be a great guest on the podcast. So, Kelly, thank you so much for joining me.

[00:00:50] Kelly: Yes. Thank you so much for having me, Scott.

[00:00:53] Scott: Of course. Maybe to get started, I’d love if you could share a little bit about your background, Kelly. What it is you’re doing in Thailand, maybe how long ago you came here.

[00:01:02] Kelly: So I’m Kelly. I’m from the Netherlands. I’m a data analyst and also e-commerce manager. I’ve been working in e-commerce for the last 10 years working on, creating e-commerce strategies for international companies, and I’ve been in Thailand since 2021.

[00:01:18] Scott: Oh, excellent. What made you move from China to Thailand?

[00:01:23] Kelly: In China, I was working in a corporate business and I felt I was kind of reaching my maximum there in terms of personal and career development. And then I met my current husband and COVID happened. So all these things together, we decided to move. Take a new adventure or go on a new adventure and move to Thailand.

[00:01:44] Scott:

[00:01:44] Well obviously what we’re gonna be talking about a lot today is e-commerce in Thailand specifically. But I’m curious when you made that transition from China to Thailand, was there anything surprising to you about the Thai e-commerce market?

[00:01:58] Kelly: Yes, because China is a really big e-commerce market. It’s very high speed. People are ordering a lot. really a lot online in the sense that it can go, your revenue from online can be almost up to 50%. So it’s a really big share of the business. And then when I moved here, I saw, of course, people are ordering online, but not as much as in China in that sense.

[00:02:27] I don’t think you can really compare because China’s such a big country. Right. And they, they are very fast in adopting new technologies. But I, so yeah, the big surprise was just like, okay, e-commerce is there, it’s growing, but it’s not as fast and contributing that much in terms of revenue for a business, I would say.

[00:02:48] Scott: Going into then your motivation for starting iBoost. It sounds like you kind of saw an opportunity here in Thailand where like, can you maybe. Be explained where you saw that opportunity, maybe the challenges that some businesses might have here and who you typically help on in the e-commerce space.

[00:03:05] Kelly: Yeah, so of course if you are new in the country, either you’re like an international brand, the biggest challenge is always to adapt to the culture locally. So if you’re an international company and you think you can just copy paste what you’re doing, let’s say in Europe or in America. That doesn’t work in Asia.

[00:03:25] People really like to see local faces, local models, local influencers, and also in Asia and also in Thailand. There are a lot of, new technologies popping up all the time. So as a brand, you really have to catch on with these new trends and really adapt. Adapt and on a very fast pace. so that is often the challenge for brands.

[00:03:48] It doesn’t matter internationally, but also locally. And I saw opportunity because I was working in China and it’s such a big fast market. I saw there’s still a lot of, room for growth and how to adjust as a company in terms of, operations, which is my strong point. And also analytically how to just use the data to really yeah, use it for making smart decisions and yeah, skill your business.

[00:04:18] Scott: Something this reminds me of is I, sometimes talk to people that underestimate what it takes to either make the adaptations that you’re talking about or just start selling online. Because they don’t maybe know what they don’t know. And I think I. There’s an over simplistic view to say, I’m just gonna start an online shop, or I’m just gonna start expanding this area.

[00:04:38] So is that something that you’ve come across?

[00:04:40] Kelly: Yeah, for sure. I think the biggest misconception is that you open a store and people just walk in, right? And you open an online store and you will get orders from day one. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that because you are in such a big marketplace with so many products and you, and the only way to, to stand out is to reach the top of the ranking.

[00:05:06] So you really have to make an effort to, to make yourself visible, to really stand out and to, be there at the top of the search engine. Otherwise, it’s going to be very tough to be discovered. They make it very easy to join the platform, which is very beneficial for Shopee and Lazada because they will have more active users, which looks very good to their shareholders, but as a merchant you have your own challenges, which are different from, let’s say, the company Lazada and Company Shopee.

[00:05:42] Scott: Whoa there. Hold up for just one second. I’m sorry to interrupt, but if you are struggling with business operations, cultural challenges, or growing your business in Thailand, you are not alone. This market is really tough to navigate. I know because I’ve been here since 2012 and I’ve experienced a lot of these challenges myself.

[00:06:01] That’s why I founded Fractiond, a Thailand-based consulting firm aimed at helping businesses succeed in Thailand. My Accenture experience from the US, and our community of top consultants from around the world, allow us to deliver top tier strategy and execution to businesses in Thailand. If you wanna learn more, you can book a free 15 minute discovery call to see how we can help your business.

[00:06:25] You can email us at [email protected]. Alright, back to the show.

[00:06:31] It reminds me a lot just being I’ve worked a lot in the marketing space and it’s something like Google, right? Google, sure, let’s say in the past had a ton of the market share when it came to search, which is very attractive. But then when you start to advertise on Google. Or you start to try to publish a lot so that you get showing, you show up higher in the organic search results in Google, well then it’s different, right?

[00:06:52] Because now every business owner wants to be at the top of the list or wants to bid for those keywords. And then guess what? You’re competing against everyone else trying to get those top spots and Google’s winning with all that competition, right? They’re selling the keywords, the pay per click. They’re getting the best search results to their users, but everyone’s trying to get those spots.

[00:07:14] And so the volume of searchers it diminishes the further you go down the list. And so it is a zero sum game is really what I’m saying. And it sounds like it’s the same with these e-commerce platforms, is that right?

[00:07:25] Kelly: Yeah, that’s totally right. It is, so it is a search engine, right? So especially, and that’s also a big difference here in Asia. People use apps for searching and discovering, rather than going to Google or any browser, or search engine. They use applications to discover and to search for products.

[00:07:47] And indeed, if you are ranked number one, you’ll get 50% of the clicks and the first 10 will get 80%. So after that if you’re lower than that, you won’t get a lot of traffic. So, and then, so you’re in this crowded marketplace, everybody wants to be in the top 10. And organically, probably as well, that takes a very long time to rank high organically.

[00:08:13] so these companies, like the platforms they don’t really care about. They don’t really care so much about you. They just care about, the product that brings them conversions because they get paid on every sale that you make. You have to pay commission. So for them. for the platforms, the logic is if you can guarantee conversion, I will push you higher, I will give you more visibility.

[00:08:37] So you really have to not only work for yourself, you also have to work for the platforms. And you get zero love back if you don’t do that. And it takes a long time before you get Yeah, you get there to the top. Yeah. So you, definitely need some marketing budget there to, to rank high.

[00:08:55] Scott: So this sounds like something you shouldn’t dabble in. It’s not this level of, Hey, I just, let me just throw my product up on Lazada and Shopee and cross my fingers. Hope for the best. It sounds like starting with a bit of strategy,

[00:09:06] Kelly: Yes.

[00:09:07] Scott: Might be beneficial. Right. Which is obviously where you come in. So I thought something that we could talk through are a few scenarios or a couple scenarios common situations that maybe I’ve seen and I’m sure you’ve seen as well.

[00:09:19] The first of which would be, let’s say that there’s an established business that already has their product in Thailand. On Thai shelves. Maybe they’re in the local supermarket or they’re on, you know, in Central and all these nice malls here. So they have a product and like I said, they’ve been successful.

[00:09:40] And let’s say that they now see the opportunity to expand online. Could you maybe walk us through some of the steps that would make sense for that type of company or product to, to do, or maybe some of the mistakes you often see that they make.

[00:09:56] Kelly: Yeah, so for those that are already physically in Thailand and have a physical presence, unfortunately that’s no guarantee for success on online. What I often see is that these business owners, they think that when they open the store online, they immediately see success. But they don’t understand that you start from zero again.

[00:10:22] You have to stand out in the marketplace. You have to assign marketing budget to this new shop because across the whole Southeast Asian reg region Lazada has 1 million products on their platform. So if you then come with your products, it’s very hard to to stand out and to be found if people don’t know that you are on the platform.

[00:10:48] So the good thing is that you probably already have a following. You have people know about your brand. You have brand recognition. So for them it’s more about announcing, look, we are also available here. We are also you know, we make it, available for you online so you can shop anytime of the day.

[00:11:07] So it’s more about raising awareness inside your following and yeah, and then try to overcome your own personal hurdle that you need marketing, budget to create awareness that you are available on the platform. Yeah, again, it’s not, the fact that you are, in a lot of places, in a lot of shops doesn’t make it that your online store will immediately be a success.

[00:11:32] Scott: Yeah, I can imagine that being a really difficult pill to swallow. ’cause if you’ve already been successful and if you already have brand recognition, I can imagine it being like, oh, well I already have customers that are gonna buy from me. Put it on the platform. They will just come to me. And to your point, I guess if you have those platforms are already selling to existing sellers there, or already recommending other products, and they’re not necessarily, the platform is not necessarily gonna make more money, off you than the other ones that they’re already promoting.

[00:12:03] So now you’re playing their game. And so maybe you went from a big fish in a small pond to a small fish in a big pond when you’re going onto these, really large platforms,

[00:12:13] Kelly: yeah, exactly. So the algorithm works in a way that we already discussed, SEO on keywords. Those are, I think the most critical. And the other part is that. they will look at your sales records. So ironically, when you’re a new shop, you don’t have any sales records, you don’t have any sales revenue, but the algorithm looks at who had the most sales in the last seven days, or who had the most sales in the last 30 days. And based on that, they will divide their traffic, amongst their sellers. So when you already have a presence, you will be able to, work on this, KPI, let’s say faster because if you do a little bit of marketing people like, oh, okay, I know this brand. Oh, I can buy it here.

[00:12:59] Scott: So it’s easier to build a sales record. Whereas if you don’t. Have any presence yet in Thailand at all, that will take longer. But yeah, you have to first prove that you are worth it to the platform that you can sell, and then they will, give you more attention. Yeah, understood. Now, one question. This is getting a little bit tactical, but let’s say that I do have. Established brand. Maybe I’ve been selling some level of my product on my own website and I’m on physical shelves in Thailand and I decide to go online. You mentioned that the benefit they have is they already have those followers.

[00:13:35] They already have probably some level of an email list. I’m curious whether or not it makes sense that a company like that might point at their existing subscribers or followers that are already purchasing from their website, for instance, onto Lazada, for instance, to try to get some sales through that platform and get some reviews through that platform.

[00:13:56] So maybe it’s a case of, Hey, we’re now launching on Lazada. We’re offering a discount or this special package now on Lazada that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to get. Go on there and buy it through that platform. Would that maybe make sense, even if they’re losing a portion of their margin by funneling some of their existing crowd to that?

[00:14:16] Kelly: Yeah, definitely. Like I said, it’s just about making, so if you go to the marketplaces is because it’s the convenience, right? You want to offer this convenience to, your shoppers because you can maybe have already your own online shop, but, the marketplaces offer even more visitors, more customers.

[00:14:36] So it’s first to scale your business, but also just making it more convenient because a lot of people use these applications to shop. So then communicating to them that you’re also available on Shopee and Lazada for. As a business, of course you have to pay commission to the platform. So it’s not as beneficial than maybe having your own website, but it’s a convenience, it’s a big potential for growth.

[00:15:01] So yeah, announcing it among your following is definitely something I would recommend.

[00:15:07] Scott: Got it. So it’s maybe not a zero sum game because if people are already going on your site. Sure you’re making more margin on that, but you don’t have the same exposure. And maybe they’re not purchasing as frequently because they have to now go on and go to a bookmark and then go to your site and then make a purchase.

[00:15:22] Whereas if they’re constantly seeing, do you wanna order this again? Would you like another one of these things? Maybe you’re actually getting more frequent purchases from those same buyers, even if the margin per sale might be lower.

[00:15:34] Kelly: Yeah, potentially. Because of course you, you also like the comp, the company Shopee Lazada, they, make it. They make it that you keep buying, right? You keep seeing advertisements also outside the platform, let’s say. So they have a very strong drive to make you buy on the platform, so you will be chased by them. And you can just reach so many people, let’s say.

[00:16:00] Whereas on your own website yeah, you have to use different tactics to build that type of, or that number of, visitors and customers.

[00:16:11] Scott: Yeah. Now you mentioned Shopee and Lazada, so again, in the same scenario of an established company that’s already been operating in Thailand. If they are to launch on these two platforms and they are to do it simultaneously, would it have a benefit to them? Would there almost be an I dunno, just some, sort of efficiency or benefit to where, hey, we’re launching on two platforms, we can spread that budget across those two platforms.

[00:16:39] Or are these platforms operating kind of independently from one another?

[00:16:43] Kelly: Well, yeah, if you can of course launch simultaneously and, I see that a lot. The, well, and then you have to keep in mind you need two budgets, right? You need to promote yourself in both platforms. Then both of them have promotional calendar, so you have to discount. It’s, almost in sync these calendars, but could be that.

[00:17:08] If you count all the days, you’ll have a lot of days that you’re on promotion. If that’s your strategy, right? If, you’re like entirely new, I always say just go for one channel for one platform, and then build from there. And then it’s also, then you already know you’ve tested it a lot, you have a lot of data, you have a lot of insights, and then it’s easier to copy to the second one.

[00:17:30] And that makes it a bit more manageable in the beginning. I’m not saying don’t, you know, don’t be on two platforms at the same time. It’s just a matter of how can you manage that yourself. And also each platform has its own rules. Lazada is not always that merchant friendly. I would say shop is a bit easier, but.

[00:17:52] You know, also the cost for marketing differs between the two platforms. So yeah, I would say just go for one and then within a short time you can expand to the next one. Let’s say.

[00:18:03] Scott: Got it. So I get your point that some things are gonna be similar. Like here in Thailand, it’s very common to have the sales on the, seventh month. Seventh day of the seventh month, right? So 7, 7, 8, 8. The double digits are really big for sales, and I totally get that. That would be on both platforms, but these still are different platforms.

[00:18:21] So you have to go in with eyes wide open and say, if you want two platforms simultaneously, make sure you have two budgets. If you have a limited budget, maybe don’t launch to at the same time and just spread it across the two because you know, again, there’s gonna be different learning curves, I suppose.

[00:18:37] Now let’s maybe jump over to the second scenario. So let’s imagine there is a new business, or let’s say that they’re established outside of Thailand, but they are now trying to enter the Thai market and, but they’re not on physical shelves. They don’t have the brand recognition here. Are there any different recommendations you’d give to a company like that?

[00:18:57] Kelly: Yeah, for those that are like very, like new, to Thailand and then also new to the online for them it’s the advice I have is that you have to build your brand awareness, which often you do outside the platform. So I would say as you launch on the platforms, try also to like work on your social media.

[00:19:20] Try to get a following. So your advertising budget also goes to social media platforms to raise awareness to generate followers so people actually know. And then so they know that you exist and that you are in Thailand. And in that sense, you’ll also need to work on reviews because if no one knows about you, probably no one has ever tested your products. They don’t know what’s, you know, what, will be the experience. So you have to work more on trust so people trust you and then they will convert. Whereas if you already have a presence, they already know your products. And so conversion is faster, let’s say, and higher because they already know your product and they know what you stand for. But as a new brand, as a new company, work on your trust, which is more outside the platform. and, but also inside the platform you have to work on, getting those first reviews, making sure you have conversion and then slowly build your, sales records.

[00:20:20] Scott: Got it. So the platforms, and maybe we start with what the platforms have in common. It sounds like they care about number of reviews, right? Positive reviews. I assume. They, they probably care about sales, right? ’cause they don’t wanna point people to a page that aren’t converting, right?

[00:20:36] Kelly: Yes

[00:20:37] Scott: Do they care about any promotions when it comes to shipping?

[00:20:40] Because I purchase a lot of things and they always say free shipping. is that a big deal for them that you offer something like that or the time in which you ship? Does that matter?

[00:20:49] Kelly: Yes. So you have different perspectives. So from a merchant, you each platform has their, set of rules, which are very similar. You need to ship on time. So within 48 hours, you have to ship out the package 48 or 72. You have to make sure that you reply within 10 minutes to chats that are coming in.

[00:21:10] And of course you have to make sure that you’re not. that your listing is correct your stock is accurate, et cetera. So from a merchant perspective, these are the rules that you have to work on or you have to work with for both platforms. Now in Thailand, and I guess this is a common, common thing that a lot of a lot of shoppers are very price sensitive, so of course for, of course, they want you to offer free shipping because it looks very good on the platform. And if you, as Lazada can say, okay, most of our products are free for shipping, then okay. You know, that attracts new users for them as well.

[00:21:54] So they have, let’s say, this incubation time where they say, okay, at least you need to have at least 10 products, join at least one promotion and, you need to offer free shipping. Of course for a customer. This is very nice. And, yes, I want to buy, of course, I want have a coupon for free shipping, but as a merchant it can be quite tough on you.

[00:22:16] And then, yeah, you have to see if you can manage that.

[00:22:20] Scott: Yeah, it’s back to you’re playing their rules and

[00:22:23] Kelly: Yes.

[00:22:23] Scott: They want as many people to follow their promotions. And just a tip for maybe individuals who are not merchants. It’s hard to say this is probably an, against the merchant, but for those. Who don’t know in Thailand, if you do purchase from a company like Lazada, the mobile promotions are really quite good.

[00:22:38] So I only make purchases on my phone nowadays because there’s constantly 15% offs and all these additional coupons that you can take advantage of. But I do have to feel a little bit for the merchants because I assume that they’re taking a big part of that hit when I’m getting my, my, my big coupons on my phone.

[00:22:57] Kelly: Yeah, some is sponsored by the merchant, but, a lot of the, it is also sponsored by the company Lazada. So the, but the thing is they don’t, they won’t tell you. Okay this like we are offering these coupons to the entire platform. So you will still see that, you will have your normal, income, let’s say.

[00:23:19] So you will get the price that you are, selling it for. You will get that income, but the person who buys it, they will see a discount. But as a merchant, you don’t know how much you’re being discounted by the platform or how much are these coupons?

[00:23:34] Scott: Interesting. Yeah, I know with Lazada it’s called Lazada subsidy sometimes, right. And I sometimes will get the package, open it up, and I’ll see the full price on the package. On the invoice. On the tax invoice, everything. But it’s maybe subsidized by Lazada in some cases, so,

[00:23:50] Kelly: Yes. Sometimes for the promotions it’s often 50 50. It, you know, there, there are always a lot of rules and. Things you have to read, when you join the promotions. But in the end, customers don’t care. You know, they, see discount. They’re like, okay, let’s go for it. But yeah, as a merchant, it’s, it can be a bit, mind blowing, like all the different rules and, yeah, what’s happening on the platform.

[00:24:14] So sometimes it, they overcomplicate it a little bit, I feel.

[00:24:18] Scott: Yeah, I suppose you still just need to make sure you have the resources, whether it be the budget or the team to actually be managing this. Because to your point, it’s like it. To be able to respond to someone quite quickly in chat within 10 minutes, or, answer all these questions. And sometimes they can be silly questions, and sometimes you can deal with reviews that are like people complaining about the shipping or the, versus the product, right?

[00:24:41] There’s all these little challenges you have to deal with, and you have to make sure that you have at least a team member that’s able to respond to these things. Otherwise, I suppose you get burned a little bit, right?

[00:24:51] Kelly: Yeah, no, that’s true. And that’s also one of the, mistakes I see is that companies will assign someone or, someone with a little bit of experience to manage the day-to-day activities, but you really need devoted people who have experience and knowledge and who are like jumping on things when, you know, might be the order was shipped wrong or you have a refund. you know, how do you recover from that?

[00:25:20] How do you make sure people are satisfied? Yeah. And how do you navigate all these different promotions all the time.

[00:25:27] Scott: Well, now, when you started out, I understand your background in analytics, you seem like a very analytics focused individual. Where it’s not, let me just throw throw something at the wall and just hope it works. You’re gonna be looking at the numbers to make sure that these products are successful online.

[00:25:40] So I’m curious if there’s any trends that you see or common mistakes, let’s say. That owners or leaders that are selling products online make may be looking at the wrong metric or metrics that they don’t look at that they should be looking at.

[00:25:54] Kelly: Yeah. It starts by looking at the data itself and then, really understanding it. So one mistake is that they’re like, oh, there’s all this data. I dunno what it means. I just don’t look at it anymore. That’s not the way to go, of course. So there are some, some good metrics that you can can observe. So especially in the beginning, you need to understand which products work, which don’t work. So when you turn on the advertisements, you can quickly see, which products bring in the most traffic. And for example, also add to cart because add to cart means people are interested in it. You may not have the conversion yet, but at least you get some insights on, which products can in the future generate the most revenue, let’s say.

[00:26:43] So these will be your star players that you really have to, start focusing on. so if you have a lot of products, you kind of have to, then you already have a more like narrow, yeah, parameter that you can work on. so that is, so that’s one. Other ones of course. Yeah, you have to think about, the click-through rate of your keywords and conversion rate of your products.

[00:27:08] And those are the smart, smart, data points that you have to look at. It’s also good to look at when do people buy, because there is a certain trend in the marketplace. So around 12, around noon, when people go for lunch, that’s when people start shopping.

[00:27:26] So if you want to run a limited time offer, make sure you do it when they come to your shop. And also a lot of action is happening from 9:00 PM. So nine in the evening till midnight. somehow people, a lot of people are then buying and shopping. So make sure that if you have an offer or yeah, if messages are coming in that you are aware that, after working hours, there is also activity happening.

[00:27:52] So make sure that you’re aligned with that.

[00:27:55] Scott: Yeah, great point. I think sometimes people can just look at the very last point, which might be sales, and you sometimes have to look at those leading things that come before the sale, right? So if you’re just saying, oh look, my sales are high, or my sales are low, that’s one thing. But compared to what. And I think to your point the fact that there are.

[00:28:13] There might be seasonality, there might be, as you said the time that people are making purchases. These are details that someone should be looking at. Because if you’re just kind of hoping for the best and saying, my sales are up, my sales are down. It has to be, is it compared to last month? Is it compared to last year?

[00:28:28] You know, what are you actually looking at? ’cause you have to look at some of these other metrics, otherwise you’re missing out.

[00:28:32] Kelly: Yeah. And yeah, and it’s also just to add, it’s the same with the promotions. You definitely see a lot of, sales happening at the end of the month. It’s when people get their salary and then at the beginning of the month, so they still have budget to spend and then it kind of quiets down a little bit.

[00:28:50] And then, so mid mid month, your sales are probably a bit lower. and then at the end you’ll see an uplift again. So, and then you, and that also affects your, marketing performance. So suddenly you have less traffic to your store just because people are shopping less.

[00:29:08] Scott: I think that was surprising to me. I’m from the US and we were used to the biweekly or every other week getting a paycheck. Whereas here in Thailand, I’m not sure what the percentage is, but I think a lot of people are paid on a monthly basis. And so you’ll notice that the shops and the traffic will get really hectic on payday.

[00:29:26] Kelly: Yeah.

[00:29:26] Scott: The one time, right.

[00:29:28] And that always blew my mind. I was like, why are these, why is this Saturday so busy? when I’m just trying to get my groceries and it’s because of payday, right? So, very interesting. It doesn’t surprise me that it happens online as well. Now, do you have any other tips that you’d share? I, guess let me just first start out with something simple.

[00:29:45] If you were to choose one platform over the other, between Lazada and Shopee, which one would you, and again, I, get that this is depending on the product and all this other stuff, there’s nuance here, but if you just had to pick one, which one would you pick between selling on Shopee versus Lazada?

[00:30:02] Kelly: I think, yeah, I know that Shopee still has the biggest market share. So I would say go for Shopee because, you know, it’s just the biggest one out there. And I said for as from emergent perspective, it’s also user friendly. Let’s say they are not so strict and tough in terms of, how you can join the promotions or, yeah. how they treat you as a merchant. They’re a bit more friendlier than Lazada, let’s say.

[00:30:30] Scott: Good to know. I haven’t used Shopee myself. I’ll admit I’m a bit of a Lazada ag addict to these days. But, but good to know as a merchant that might be a good one to start with, right?

[00:30:42] Kelly: Personally, I also, as a consumer, I think Lazada is much easier, and to use. Because they also have this English, translation and, I think the interface just, much better. But from a merchant perspective no, it’s quite tough.

[00:31:01] Scott: Right now, you’ve already gone through a several different tips or recommendations about shipping, about number of products, about things like this, but is there anything that we didn’t didn’t touch on that are maybe operational tips or recommendations that you can share.

[00:31:15] Kelly: Yeah, so operational, I would say. So if you are on two platforms at the same time, make sure that you can manage your stock. Make sure that, you can use a third party tool for this, for example, to manage, your stock across two platforms or multiple platforms. So in that sense, you, make sure that you always communicate the right stock to your customers.

[00:31:39] Scott: Now what about the future? What do you, see for the future in this? Are there any sort of trends that you’re catching in the e-commerce space that you think will either become more or less popular in the coming years?

[00:31:50] Kelly: The thing I really love about, Asia and in this region is that every application sort of has an e-commerce integration. So for example, you can go on Facebook, you do Facebook shop, you can have Facebook Live, which is quite different from in Europe this doesn’t exist.

[00:32:09] And you have Instagram shop, so. All these technical integrations with the platforms and with e-commerce that’s really trending right now. And there are new apps. for example, Lemon8 is a new one where you have user-generated content and when you click on it, you jump straight away to I think TikTok or to Lazada, one of those.

[00:32:30] So there’s always a way to shop when you see something that you like. So that’s definitely a trend. And TikTok of course, is growing a lot. it’s. Predicted to overtake Lazada in a sense. so the trend there is video live streaming. Yeah, people love to see, like I said, they love to see what they buy.

[00:32:52] So I think that is going to expand. Of course, more live streaming. More video. You see also Shopee now when you start promoting your product, your products also end up in promotional videos that they broadcast across their platform. So those are definitely the trends.

[00:33:10] Oh and one. what works also very well is affiliate marketing. So you, use other people’s followers, let’s say to promote your products. In return for commission. And yeah, the amazing thing is that both platforms, Shopee and Lazada, and TikTok also, they have this, entire marketplace of affiliates, integrated in their platform.

[00:33:36] So you can just go to the store backend, go to the affiliate program, and then you can select the, affiliates that you want to work with which makes it very easy to join, this type of marketing.

[00:33:49] Scott: Very cool. You’ve been very generous with what you’ve shared, Kelly. I’m curious if there’s any topic that. I didn’t ask about that you wish we would’ve touched on today.

[00:33:59] Kelly: Just as like a final, final thought is that I’ve learned from experience that it, once you start joining the promotions and you start discounting, it’s very hard to get out of that cycle. It’s very easy to get hooked on all these different promotions, and of course you’ll get a lot of visibility and you can also earn a lot of money on those peak days.

[00:34:25] But in the end, it’s very addictive. And if you then not join the next month, you’ll see a big difference, in terms of revenue. And I also learned that it can, hurt your margin quite a bit. So I would say just keep a more long-term view on things because yeah, the discounting and the promotions can yeah, generate very quickly, big wins, but you can get hooked on it also quite fast.

[00:34:54] Scott: Yeah, that’s a really great point. You can see that happening with any of these platforms where as soon as you play by their rules, you can do a lot better. But then now you are hooked into their rules and you’re, you’re playing their game. And I think you’ve said that elsewhere, is that you have to remember that it’s their marketplace.

[00:35:11] Kelly: It’s not your marketplace. You’re, if you’re a merchant, you are. You could say, okay, they’re providing a service to me. You know, I’m the customer, but in reality, they’re the big player and you’re going into their walled garden and you’re going into their system. And this is especially true if you have partners. So if you have you sell through a distribution model or anything, so let’s say you already have that physical presence and you are constantly, discounting online, your partners in physical shop wills at some point say. look, we are, you know, you’re hurting our business because you keep discounting the products and we are not getting the same, margin, or our margins are too low to join, to do the same.

[00:35:55] Yeah. So you ha really have to maintain that relationship, of course, while also you have to maintain the relationship with Shopee and Lazada. So, yeah, you have to be a bit smart about how to, do that, how to balance it.

[00:36:10] Scott: Yeah, and that goes back to your earlier recommendation is that if you just assign a junior marketer marketing administrator or just some person to say, Hey, get me on that platform, I think that’s fine, but you really have to be thinking who’s taking responsibility for the bigger picture of how much is going to one platform versus another?

[00:36:28] What is your strategy behind your discounts because to your point, they can have other implications. So you gotta think the bigger strategy, I suppose that’s a really important thing to take away from this. And with that said, what is the best way for people to either find out more about you or get in touch?

[00:36:45] Kelly: So if you want to have a fresh perspective, you can connect with me on LinkedIn or on my website, iBoostonline.com. I’m also a member of the Australian Chamber, so if you want to meet me in person, I’m often there either in Phuket or in Bangkok.

[00:37:03] Scott: Excellent. Kelly, thank you so much for sharing all this with us. It’s been a pleasure and, I really appreciate it.

[00:37:10] Kelly: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I hope it’s, it was useful and, yeah, strategically it helps you to, you know, to make up your mind how to take on these marketplaces.

[00:37:24] Scott: Absolutely. Well thank you again and we’ll catch you on the next one.

[00:37:28] Kelly: Thanks so much, Scott. ​