E-commerce firm ties up with SM

Shopee, the leading e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia, has tied up with the SM Group to bring its department store products also available on its digital platform, which focuses more on mobile commerce market.

Shopee COO Terence Pang said the partnership with SM is largely on the co-marketing aspect of products they can sell using its platform stressing that online can bring big retailers new business that offline cannot.

SM is Shopee’s first big retailer to come on board starting with its department store items, focusing on the mobile consumer market. They just had an official launch recently.

“Shopee has proven to be helping drive customers to SM, mostly from the young market segment with no access to the offline SM store,” Pang said.

Pang explained that the idea with this partnership is to entice online buyers and sellers to go to the mall.

Shopee, which now employs 250 and utilizing two floors of Net Park building in Bonifacio Global City, expects to grow further the local operation given the robust business. Regionally, Shopee employs 2,500 in 7 southeast Asian countries – Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Philippines, and Taiwan.

For instance, there are now over 200,000 Filipino sellers on Shopee nationwide, mostly micro, small and medium enterprises, initially starting as social enterprises until they scale up into a bigger commercial business.

“Everybody said that the Philippines is a developing country, that is not true. In the last two quarters, lots of people come online because of the explosion of mobile commerce,” he said.

Shopee has also localized its operation making its sellers accessible to buyers. For instance, it accepts cash on delivery to cater to Filipinos with who not have a credit or debit card. Cash on delivery is still the preferred payment option in the Philippines. Its nationwide frees shipping allows Filipinos from all over the country to shop over 3 million active listings without worrying about delivery costs.

Southeast Asian countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand are called mobile-first markets or economies that jumped straight into the mobile commerce, bypassing the personal computers (PC) or desk stop stage. The challenge then, he said, is how to bring the sellers into online to serve a growing number of mobile shoppers.

In the last two years alone, he said, 90 percent of customers use mobile commerce instead of using personal computers (PCs).

In fact, Pang said that Shopee’s regional operation has generated $5 billion in annualized gross merchandize value of which the Philippine market could account for as much as 5-10 percent share.

This has led Shopee to position its e-commerce platform more for the mobile commerce users, by putting in more features for mobile customers such as the Shopee Live Chat, allowing buyers and sellers to engage in real-time conversations.

Shopee, whose parent company SEA Ltd. is also listed in the New York Stock Exchange, was first launched in Singapore in 2015 and has since expanded its reach to six other southeast Asian countries.

In the past two years, it has over listed over 3 million active sellers and over 6 million downloads.