Industry: E-Commerce

Solution: Transforming Lazada from B2C (Retail) into B2BC (Marketplace)

Founded in 2012, Lazada Group is the leading e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia. Lazada accelerates progress in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam through commerce and technology.

With the largest logistics and payments networks in the region, Lazada is a part of its consumers’ daily lives in the region and aims to serve 300 million shoppers by 2030. Since 2016, Lazada is the Southeast Asia flagship platform of the Alibaba Group powered by its cutting-edge technology infrastructure.

>700% GMV Growth In 2 Years

THE CHALLENGE

• Prior to launch of Lazada, there was no e-commerce footprint in Southeast Asia
• Lazada Group initially launched retail (B2C) model in 2012
• Operations had limited scalability due to limited: capital, physical warehousing space, limited capital to buy products, and limited website traffic
  • All commercial operational processes were built for retail model and did not support marketplace (B2BC) requirements
• After launch of the marketplace, there was very little buy-in from team to adopt change management
• Marketplace operations were constantly changing making it difficult to launch and optimize processes as infrastructure required constant/consistent iteration

THE SOLUTION

• Launched Lazada Marketplace
• Restructured all commercial teams and infrastructure
  • All marketplace infrastructure was developed from scratch:
    • Vendor acquisition, onboarding, incubation and marketplace operations & contracting
• All business units were given marketplace KPIs to ensure adoption of change management
• Local commercial leadership had close working relationships with regional leaders to solve complex problems and identify threats before they seriously impacted business and GTM strategies
• Constant/consistent optimization and iteration of commercial processes to exponentially scale marketplace performance

THE RESULTS

• Vendor acquisition results:
  • Short-tail revenues: onboarded local brands, top retailers and distributors onto platform
  • Long-tail revenues: onboarded tens of thousands SME, micro/nano retailers
• Grew product assortment exponentially
• Competition b/w vendors drove selling price down to ensure Lazada had lowest selling prices in market
• Brand equity quickly grew
  • Quickly became the top Marketplace in SeA, website traffic grew exponentially, customer acquisition cost (CAC) significantly dropped QoQ/YoY
• Rocket Internet successfully exited Lazada Group with sell to Alibaba Group for $4bUSD in 2016