Zalora Faces Pressure, Oliver Samwer in Singapore To Motivate Team

The folks from Rocket Internet has already made waves in Europe,and they are now putting their clone factory in Southeast Asia. E-commerce players in the region should all tremble in fear. Or should they?

The folks from team Rocket has been launching quite a few e-commerce/service sites in the past few months: Zalora.com, Foodpanda.com, and Lazada.com. An insider, who wishes to remain anonymous [1], told me that the next product launching is Home24.sg, a site that deals with furniture. In fact, Home24’s Twitter account is already up and tweeting.

Rocket Internet now has a wide range of products and services focusing on many different countries: Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Australia. The Samwer brothers are formidable with very successful track records, there’s no doubt about that. See the chart below from The Economist:

But is Rocket Internet doing well in Southeast Asia? I’m not so sure about the other products. But an insider told me that Zalora.com REALLY isn’t in a very good shape. So much so that Oliver Samwer was here in Singapore yesterday to give an eight-hour motivational talk to his team. A leaked memo (I paraphrased so it doesn’t reveal my source) reads as follow:

Hello all

Oliver Samwer is with us in Singapore today. We will have a meeting around 7.00pm. Please don’t leave the office. Oliver will also have meetings with individual teams until late tonight.

Meeting up with team late at night doesn’t spell any trouble, I know. But the meeting is probably triggered by complaints Zalora has received from its customers so far. These problems are brewing over on the Zalora Facebook page as my source pointed out. You have to switch the Facebook timeline to ‘Post by Others’ to read comments from customers. It doesn’t look good, with most of the complaints focused mainly on Zalora’s slow delivery and poor customer service. Just to show a few, here’s a comment on Zalora’s non-responsive service:

Hi, it’s been more a week (the Saturday morning after good Friday) that I have ordered something from you and I haven’t managed to login nor received an email. I wrote in to customer service on Friday last (with product description, my email and time and date of purchase). I thought the payment didn’t go through but confirmed with the bank payment has been made. Please reply, would appreciate if we can resolve this as soon as possible.

… and a complaint on technical issues: