As the trailblazer of ecommerce in Southeast Asia, Lazada is serving 560 million customers in the region, including 264 million Indonesian population.
How are Indonesian giants latently leveraging Lazada’s category listings to bolster LAZMALL fanbase.
At this moment in time, if you are not selling on Lazada, you should be. Ecommerce in Southeast Asia (SEA) has been soaring fast and the competition is fierce. Some sellers might find themselves depleting resources on counterproductive advertisements while some might have a better idea of how to spend money smartly. Whichever way, one of the most imminent and visible money printing machines in Southeast Asia is Lazada.
Inevitably, product visibility is key to success in Lazada as “Visits”, the alpha metric from Ecommerce 1.0 day, leads to conversion ergo…sales. The good news is LAZMALL sellers algorithmically gifted such privilege to boost Visits on Lazada automatically.
If you’re already a LAZMALL participant but you still feel like your Visits are low, this piece of research is for you.
The importance of store followers
When you think about it, follower manifests fanbase. A fan culture typically reflects credibility, popularity, and also act as social proof to influence others to follow you. Fame is measured by visibility, retention directly proportional to credibility, social proof would spread the word organically, and when people trust your products, your revenue will increase substantially.
Traditionally, there are several ways to acquire more followers. You can either join the promotional campaigns set up every day, week, month by Lazada. By participating in this type of campaign, your store visibility will be increased.
Another way is to try to be creative and pump out attractive offers outside of Lazada’s ecosystem. Gamification or voucher giveaway to drive users towards the store and picking up followers.
Some might take an unorthodox approach and buy followers. It’s the fastest way towards building a fanbase. However, to assure that purchased followers will always be active to browse and buy (low churn rate), it’s advisable to only recruit followers from a site with a solid background and good reviews.
BrandIQ is the first Ecommerce Analytics Platform to launch in Southeast Asia. The platform covers data collection from top regional marketplaces, spread over 6 countries.
How big boys fishing for followers
The aforementioned techniques demonstrate tactics on how you & I, small practitioners, acquire our followers but brands do it differently.
Before we get to that, let us look at the number of store followers on each category leaders on Lazada.co.id obtained from Brandiq.asia.
The graph exhibited arrays of the category with an equivalent number of followers; for instance, Mobile Phones, Camera & Drone, Home Appliances, Smart Devices, and Stationery & Craft had oddly display exactly 532,794 followers. Data Storage and Monitor & Printers’ numbers precisely match in second class, Bedding & Bath, Kitching & Dining were in the third group, and so forth.
We investigated thoroughly and detected some level of dependencies between product assortment of categories in the same class of arrays, e.g., Mobile Phones has some degree of relationship with Smart Devices so does Bedding & Bath together with Kitchen & Dining.
This peculiar finding has revealed to us the hidden gem of how Lazada accidentally gave big brands the upper hand on followers’ acquisition.
| Brand | Numbers of Followers | Category listings |
|---|---|---|
| Xiaomi | 532,794 | 5 |
| Samsung | 394,788 | 5 |
| Realme | 272,101 | 1 |
| Converse | 206,545 | 1 |
| Planet Sports | 199,826 | 2 |
| OPPO | 199,770 | 1 |
| Eiger | 171,766 | 4 |
| Apple | 143,455 | 5 |
| Watsons | 132,355 | 4 |
| Megan by Sophie Paris | 122,975 | 5 |
| Philiips | 110,102 | 2 |
| MOJOYCE OFFICIAL STORE | 106,736 | 1 |
| Miniso Indonesia | 102,580 | 9 |
| Huawei | 100,373 | 3 |
Chart B: Brands in Lazada.co.id with the number of followers > 100,000 against the number of categories that brands are listed on.
Chart B displayed the top 14 brands in Lazada.co.id with followers more than 100,000. 10 out of 14 (71%) have been listing their products at least on two or more major categories. The party consists the likes of Fortune 500 companies [Apple, Phillips], Chinese technology titans [Xiaomi, Huawei], and local dominant players [Planet Sports, Eiger]. By nature, these companies are furnished with massive resources to produce, distribute, price and promote more products. Subsequently, they dominate share of shelves whereby chance of being seen or discovered is induced.
Lazada categories are constructed by 12 main categories and enabled product tagging up to four subcategories. Mathematically, this is represented by a forest of twelve polynomial trees with maximum altitude of 5. Fortunately, a product (SKU) must commit to complete and unique path of a tree. Therefore, ‘the probability of product being view’ has simplified to a full path comparison. To Illustrate, a brand with extensive resources covering 3 paths, assuming one product placed on each category, will have probability of being viewed as high as 11x of a single-category seller (because product can either be tagged on 4 or 5 categories hence maximum probability is 5 times 3 subtracted by 4).
Stepping closer to reality, these colossus ventures also facilitate favourable number of commodities. It cultivates the gap of product being viewed as opposed to smaller enterprises. For simplicity, a calculation can be expressed by the difference between number of products of the two and multiply by ‘probability of being view’. As brands’ PageViews growth exponentially combining with classic acquisition tactics (voucher, promo code), they are unstoppable. Imagine behemoth like Tesco with inundate product lines to cover all 12 categories, their probability of product being view is almost immeasurable.
Up to this point, we are uncertain whether companies and sellers are cognizant of such artifice. However, we as an advocate to data analytics community wishes to collectively share our fact and findings to flat out the playing field and takes retail analytics to the next level.
Benefits when working with store followers
1. Improve customer relationship
By signing up followers, Lazada allows store owners to communicate with fans through the newsfeed. One should capitalize on engagement with followers and convert them to long-term customers.
2. Increase product visibility
This is a chicken and egg issue, really. By signing up followers, you can guarantee Pageviews and vice versa.
3. Organically grow more followers
Everybody had to go through the pain when trying to grow user-based from zero to thousands because credibility is everything when it comes to social. Once the reputation is adequately established, you can expect a snowballing effect on subscriptions.
4. Run exclusive promotions to fans only
In this day and age, online retail has come down to “finding excuses to discount.”. Customers are price-driven and have become a promotion seeker. When you have to discount you might as well only do it for the fans.
5. Prepare for the future
Ecommerce has yet ceased to develop, including platforms like Lazada. We can undoubtedly anticipate a significant amount of support technology to improve features to assist sellers. Having followers is equivalent to owning customers. The future is imminent; make sure you communicate with them.
Need assistance on follower acquisition, want to know where you rank against your competitors and how you can improve your ecommerce presence? Reach out to info@brandiq.asia.