If you guys haven’t noticed, I recently got into the e-commerce world on Lazada and Shopee starting around mid-February 2020. I wanted to share a quick, simple post on the must-dos for building a successful business on these marketplaces.Invest in the future of your business.
A Lazada & Shopee selling business is no different than any other business. There are pieces that are more automated than others but that doesn’t mean you can run it on a shoestring budget.
If you want to be successful on Lazada & Shopee and scale up your lifestyle business, don’t be afraid to invest do take the risk!
This means investing in platforms that help you market your products. This means investing in new product development and sourcing. It means investing a bit more of your time to make sure that your product appearance is good. It means investing to make sure you have good product images and good product content and positive reviews for all your products.
It means you need to invest your time in dealing with customers and making them happy.
You may be spending some extra time and money but it will definitely help you in the long-run. This isn’t a business that you should approach as 100% passive. You should manage it proactively.
There are very few businesses in the world that allow you to get a positive return on investment so quickly as in marketplace selling. Don’t get greedy and cut corners immediately. Focus on building a long-term business.
Actively manage your customer feedback.
Most customers rely on the reviews of the product before making any purchase. Always check for any feedbacks given whether it’s positive or negative and proactively manage them to keep your product rating in good standing.
Reviewing your customer feedback consistently will ensure that your business will have a good standing.
Please take note there are a lot of fussy customers online too too keep them make sure you build a good relationship with them so that they could introduce to their circle of people.
Utilize discounts and promotions at product launches.
When you first create a product listing in Lazada & Shopee, you are starting at ground zero. You have no product reviews and no sales history. It is not easy to get people to trust a product listing that looks like this.
Providing discounts at product launch can help you overcome this and become visible.
Keep your inventory up-to-date (and in stock).
Always do your best to keep inventory up to date so that you are not over-selling. When you’re not proactively managing your inventory, two things can happen:
You can oversell and this will result in you needing to cancel orders which has risk of giving negative reviews.
You can sell out and this will result in your product disappearing from search results. Your product going offline because of it being sold out has nearly the same impact as your seller account going on holiday mode. So don’t sell out or you will lose all your search rank boost from the past.
There is nothing more painful for a seller than selling out of product that is performing well and then restocking it just to see that sales velocity has dropped.
Actively manage your prices.
Pricing is a basic factor in the customer’s decision to make a purchase, especially here in SE Asia.
When Lazada shows two identical products (including ratings/reviews and seller rating), customers will definitely choose the one with the lowest price.
Your products should be ready to keep pace with the other sellers’ merchandise.
Market outside Lazada & Shopee at time of product launches.
There are lots of ways to market your Lazada & Shopee store.
Even though email communications and direct calls to action that lead people away from Lazada are prohibited, this does not mean that you can not market people to your store.
You can write articles and even blogs that would sell your store. Some available options for you are:
- Google SEO
- Google PPC
- Facebook Pages
- Facebook Paid Advertising
- Programmatic Advertising
Create great product images and product listings.
Since we are dealing with online customers quality images is a great factor in selling the items.
This is the first thing that customers will see, so make sure to capture high-quality images.
Make sure that your images are high-fidelity and give customers enough visibility/knowledge of what they will receive.
Follow Lazada & Shopee's terms and conditions.
When you don’t follow the rules, your account will be penalized or even suspended so, to avoid encountering future problems with your selling, make reading a habit.
This is critical to make sure that you do not fall into black-hat activity. t is an important step to follow so you won’t lose the ability to do your business.
Know your numbers.
No need to elaborate much here.
Before replenishing your stocks, you should know how much you are expecting to sell.
Before listing a product on Lazada, you should roughly know what is your profit margin when factoring in shipping as well.
You should monitor your page views and conversion rate.
Track Your Search Rank.
Search is the biggest determinant of product visibility. If you’re not tracking your product search rank for the highest volume search terms, you are driving your business blind.
Split Dragon is an automated tool designed to do this for all Lazada and Shopee sellers, and it only takes about 10 minutes to set up. I've been using it, and honestly, it’s more effective than SiteGiant.Prioritize customer satisfaction.
Providing great customer service to customers can go a long way. It’s how you connect with your customers and make first time buyers become permanent customers.
Always give the best assistance and seek reinforcement from that via 5-star reviews and positive seller reviews.
When you do online business, this also means that you respond to your customer inquiries and other matters that need immediate attention. If you provide excellent service then you will leave a mark to them and would recommend you to other potential customers in the future.
Once you start learning your numbers and tracking them weekly, the key is to keep aiming for continuous improvement. Here are some questions to keep in mind:
- How would my product’s search ranking change if I tweaked the title this way? Or that way?
- What would happen to my conversion rate if I updated my product images?
- What’s a solid approach for an A/B test?
- How can I get more views?
- How can I convert a higher percentage of those views into actual sales?
- What steps can I take to get more buyers to leave a 5-star review?
- How can I ensure the last customer service issue doesn’t happen again?
- How do I set up processes so someone else can run the business, letting me take a real vacation?
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