Lazada taps more small businesses in Southeast Asia, rolls out marketplace platform

Earlier, Rocket Internet’s Lazada CEO Maximilian Bittner, mentioned how he sees the Southeast Asian market as a “high single-digit billion US dollar opportunity.” Tapping on this insight, Lazada is further improving its e-commerce site as it rolls out of its marketplace platform for third-party merchants in Southeast Asia.

This means that merchants in Lazada across its five sites – Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines – will now have access to creating new listings, and managing and updating their inventory, all through a synchronized store management tool. Each merchant won’t have a limit on the number of products they wish to include in their catalog, and they can have access to designing the look and feel of their site, giving merchants a tailored shop within Lazada.

Maximilian says he saw the demand of the market due to the massive number of partnership requests Lazada received. He adds:

We realized the thirst for business growth online.

The expansion into marketplace has been ongoing since early May, and Lazada is expecting that this move will expand its product offering, and “continue to both sustain and grow as new partners, merchants and retailers merge with us,” says Maximilian.

While providing this functionality for merchants, Lazada still finds that it is crucial to meet the best e-commerce practices for its consumers. Along with the enhanced site for merchants, Lazada now has a Marketplace team that allocates a dedicated key account manager for merchants, which will guide the merchants, and provide e-commerce-based best practices.

(UPDATE: Provided product listing numbers and visitors are for Lazada Malaysia alone.) Lazada in Malaysia now has over 55,000 products listed in its e-commerce site, and it says it now has more than 100,000 unique visitors daily. It looks like Lazada just won’t stop anytime soon in tapping more of the Southeast Asian market. Just last month, Lazada also provided an affiliate program for bloggers to help them monetize by promoting Lazada through banner ads. We want to see soon if all of these efforts will really strike off Amazon in the region, or not.

(Editing by: Anh-Minh Do and Steven Millward)