History of Lazada vs Shopee Summery

History Of Lazada

Maximilian Bittner founded Lazada way back in 2012 along with Rocket Internet (backer of Lazada). From 2012 to 2013, they raised funds with the help of prominent investors, JP Morgan being one of them. 

In 2014, it was able to launch its first marketplace in Singapore. In the end, this proved to be a great move but during the initial phase of the project, they experienced enormous amounts of losses. 

At this time, people still prefer shopping from brick and mortar stores. There also weren’t enough people who owned a debit or credit card. As a result, they found it difficult to compete with companies like Amazon and Alibaba. 

2016 became a turning point for Lazada. By then, Alibaba decided to acquire a controlling interest. The latter also backed them up financially. And on top of that, Lazada was allowed to leverage Alibaba’s IP Protection platform. 

Now, Lazada has 155,000 sellers and 3,000 brands that sell to consumer bases across the regions. It has 300 million SKUs available on its platform and considered to be a marketplace leader in terms of wide product variety.

History Of Shopee

Forrest Xiaodong Li first founded Shopee back in 2015 under the SEA corporation. It started as a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplace. Eventually, it was able to move into a business-to-consumer (B2C) hybrid model. Since then, it has expanded to Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia, and the Philippines. 

Shopee rapidly expanded in 2019. On September 23 of that same year, Shopee officially opened a six-story regional headquarters at Singapore Science Park. It is 244,000 square feet and is six times larger than their previous office. 

This building was previously used by WeWork. Shopee arranged the necessary negotiations to be the new tenants of the building to accommodate their expansion which will make room for about 3,000 employees. This expansion was also what pushed the company further into the digital economy. 

Shopped also pioneered the use of escrow payments within marketplaces to provide more security at the end of both buyers and sellers.