6 tactics Zalora is using to beat the fashion ecommerce competition

Thailand’s ecommerce industry is worth about US$3 billion right now. It’s definitely a big pie that many companies are interested in. Rocket Internet’s Zalora is one of them.

Fashion estore Zalora recently celebrated its two-year anniversary in Thailand (it also operates in Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand). With this milestone, the company also announced that it has two million visitors each month in Thailand.

Zalora wants to become the number one online fashion destination and a major pillar in the fashion industry in Thailand. Jose Ojeda, Zalora Thailand’s country manager (pictured below), explains to Tech in Asia how the company intends to reach that goal.

Focus on mobile commerce

In the past, Zalora has been focusing on reaching out to more consumers through Facebook and search engines (using search engine marketing, or SEM). However, the company claims that over 45 percent of its sales come from mobile devices through the app and the mobile site, so for this year Zalora will focus a lot more on mobile, starting by improving its iOS and Android apps. Ojeda adds:

With huge mobile penetration in Thailand, it makes sense that as leaders in fashion ecommerce, we have the best mobile offering possible.

In addition to the apps, Zalora also partners with popular messaging app Line, which is very big in Thailand with 24 million users from a global total of about 400 million registered users. As with Rocket Internet’s sister site Lazada, the fashion ecommerce site offers special discounts through Line’s mobile commerce shopping service, which is called Line Hot Deals.

Ojeda explains that working with Line creates a significant boost in traffic to the estore.

We started to work with them on Hot Deals. We’re actually one of the first partners. Right now, Zalora is considering more options that just the [Line-based] flash sales. We want to continue working together with Line as a partner.

Zalora also works with the second largest telco in Thailand, Dtac, by providing the telco’s customers with some special discounts.

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Take the online store offline

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