Are you a new business owner hoping to start with Lazada online selling? Or are you an established business seeking to venture out into e-commerce marketplaces to get another milestone in terms of sales and visibility? Whichever you are, it is best to get familiar with the basics of online selling before you go ahead and create your first online store. Luckily, this is not rocket science, or at least it should not be. Thanks to the most successful practices of the best Lazada stores today, we can pick up a thing or two when it comes to setting up your Lazada online store. In this blog, we discuss what makes up a good online store, what the winners do, and keep you abreast with some of the best examples out there in Lazada-land at the moment.
First up, you must familiarize yourself with the Lazada system. A word of caution, it does have its good and bad points but as you immerse yourself in learning the system, you’re going to find your own little tricks to make the most out of it. There are two sections you have to be familiar with when engaging with your online selling account – the public-facing section and the merchant-facing section. Pretty self-explanatory, to be honest. The public-facing section includes all the necessary details about your product such as pricing, specs, etc. – basically the things your customer will see when they land on your page. It also provides you with publicly available metrics to attract customers such as seller size and chat response rate. On the other hand, the merchant-facing section includes private data such as your ranking, traffic analytics, sales, and the like. In this article, we will dabble more on the public-facing section and hit you up with some ways to better project your store and maximize the Lazada features for your benefit.
What Do The Best Lazada Stores Do
So, really, what does it take to make your Lazada online store take off as one of the best? What are the elements that we are looking for, and what features can you maximize to make sure you give your customers the best online shopping experience? For starters, we list down some of the things best Lazada stores do to gain traffic and ensure steady sales.
As mentioned earlier, the public-facing section is the part that your customers can see. Here we go bit by bit with the parts of your online store profile and briefly provide you with some tips on how to better project your store.
Seller Size Metric
Basically, that’s the bar your customer sees telling them how big your online store is in terms of product volume. It increases trust because the consumers know that you might have enough stock for them to buy. The bar will increase as long as you have a huge amount of products, regardless of pricing. Your seller size metric grows higher as you increase posted products so make sure you have them in stock. For beginners in online selling, it is best to invest in products that can be sold for cheaper prices but are available in big volumes.
Ship on Time Metric
This tells your customer how prompt you are in fulfilling deliveries. The more systematic you are in dropping off the deliveries, the higher your Ship on Time Rate will be. Of course, buyers would want to buy from sellers who make sure they can get the product as soon as possible. Another thing you can do to avoid these problems is to make sure you only post products that you have in stock to avoid any delays.
Chat Rate
This shows how responsive and reliable you are as a seller. One pro tip: you always have to be the last one to reply in order to boost your chat rate. That also makes your customer feel that you are serving them the product with utmost interest, and can help build rapport which will make them come back next time to buy more products.
Meanwhile, the merchant-facing section includes your Lazada store rank which tells you your rank based on how many items you sell. This is arguably the most important among the many metrics Lazada provides you. However, wherever you might have a lower score among these metrics can only be resolved by improving your public-facing section to satisfy your customers. Also, make sure to ask for reviews from your customers. It keeps your ratings higher when you receive positive reviews.
Want to keep your positive ratings high, or bring them even higher? Here are some tips:
Always have your items in stock, and never cancel
Nothing is more frustrating for a customer than to find the item they want, and then have their order canceled just because the item or a specific variant of it eventually appears to be unavailable with the merchant. So, the rule of thumb should just post what you currently have, update your listings regularly, and issue store advisories in case there is a shortage. In the rare case that you cannot give the customer their exact order, why don’t you hook them up with some freebies as an act of reparation?
Always reply, and have the last word
Lazada, in the absence of a smart AI to measure chat quality, basically just looks at the last reply in the conversation to mark whether a chat is completed – and it has to be you, the seller. In case you have a lot to attend to and cannot respond to chats personally, you can try to consider hiring a full-time staff to manage your chat? After all, as long as they are using the online store’s Lazada account, that should be fine. But if you don’t have the budget to do just that, just make sure you have the last word. But seriously consider that full-time chat reply staff because it also bolsters your chat response rate which frankly can attract more customers.
So there you are. We have discussed some of the basics you have to keep in mind in managing your online store profile. However, these are just the basics and it’s ultimately up to you to level it up. To help your imagination, try to treat your online store the same way you would a physical store. Besides having systems in place for a hassle-free customer experience, your store has to look welcoming and attractive. To keep your customers coming back for more, we must make sure to provide added value to their shopping experience. Thank the heavens, that some of the best brands currently in Lazada have provided us with a treasure chest of examples to gain inspiration from. In this next part, we list down the best Lazada store examples and what makes them stand out.
Best Lazada Store Examples
For our list, we focus on Southeast Asian examples of the best e-commerce stores we can find on Lazada. Diverse as can be, we included examples from Malaysia to the Philippines and various products such as jewelry, tech, and collectible cars. These are just some, and by no means the definitive list, but there should be plenty of lessons to pick up from these stores that have skyrocketed their sales just by pushing the right buttons at the right timing.
Trippy Travelers (Singapore)
Branching out from its product map, a scratchable map from the UK, Trippy Travelers co-founder Michelle Lee is now selling a variety of products including travel accessories, home decor, and her self-design travel journals, and coloring books. She sends out products ranging from 200 to 300 orders a month, with a majority to Singaporean customers, with occasional buyers from Indonesia, Norway, and Australia. Lee utilizes to her advantage the Seller Picks feature on Lazada which allows her to choose three products to help her promote the store. According to her, using Seller Picks helped her boost store traffic by up to 8 times more.
Qisahn (Singapore)
Qisahn, a video game retailer, is an example of a business with a physical store that has ventured into adding an online store for further growth in sales. With its joint campaigns with Lazada, Qisahn was able to grow its sales to a staggering 25 times its usual amounting S$178,000.
Zerhea’s Jewelry Collection (Philippines)
Zerhea is founded by an overseas Filipino worker employed in the Middle East, who saw an opportunity to buy jewelry for a cheaper price in her country of employment and sell them in one of her two Lazada online stores. Because she bought them for a cheaper price in the Middle East, her affordable prices for jewelry are attractive to lots of customers which helped her boost sales, enough to start another online store venturing into car parts and accessories.
Colourette (Philippines)
Colourette is a local cosmetics brand in the Philippines that specializes in multi-use makeup products. Think you can use one product for your lips, blush, eye shadow and probably any use you can think of. What’s better is that they come at an affordable price. Colourette became very popular in their Philippine customer base by making use of Lazada tools such as vouchers and discounted prices.
Plus Size Boutique (Philippines)
Novelty and niche matter, even in online stores. Plus Size Boutique offers clothes for plus size people locally made in the Manila district of Divisoria. The use of tools in Lazada such as the 11.11 sale, put Plus Size’s two top sales records at P2.3 million and P1.3 million. This is a perfect example of increasing volume, selling at affordable prices, and gaining tons of orders which equals an overall boost in sales.
Mono Digital (Malaysia)
Mono Digital is recognized by Lazada itself as one of its top online stores. Their overall performance in a multitude of metrics has earned them a steady spot in the top rankings. Their sales boost is partly due to them maximizing the regular sale milestones in Lazada. In fact, their expertise in running online stores has gained the founders their LazStar Academy Trainer badges.
Rams Home Decor (Malaysia)
Since going online, Rams Home Decor has increased its overall sales by at least 30%. During their transition stage into online selling, Rams made good use of vouchers and store decorations to attract more customers. Today, it is one of the most regarded online brands in the field of home decor.
Tukiyem13 (Indonesia)
Indonesia’s Tukiyem13 perfectly illustrates how the business owner must know their customer base. Selling Muslimmah fashion, Tukiyem13 receives about 5,000 orders per month. Sales spike during the month of Ramadan. The store attributes its steady sales to maximizing the Lazada Seller Tools section, and its wide offer of cash-on-delivery options.
Palm (Thailand)
Palm sells cleaning products ranging from products such as tissue paper, cleaning materials, and others to hotels, restaurants, and resorts. When they entered the e-commerce market, and the masterful use of Lazada’s Seller Tool’s metrics, the company owners were exposed to additional customer bases such as temples, churches, and hospitals. There also has been an unprecedented reach in rural areas which are otherwise unaware of their products.
Let the metrics guide you
In any business affair, the most dangerous method is to decide anything without a solid basis. Thankfully, Lazada provides us with a comprehensive set of metrics to determine which of our marketing strategies are truly working. Make use of these metrics to carefully plan out your marketing strategies and measure your success.
Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy book that will just give you the absolute do’s and don’ts for your online store’s success. Read a lot, take your time browsing on Lazada and adapt what you think are the best practices that these successful businesses have employed. Know your business, know your audience – these are just a few of the cardinal rules in ensuring your online store’s success.
Having these best practices, on the other hand, does not tell us that we should only stick to them. Once you take a good grip on the ropes of online selling and digital marketing, do not be afraid to mix it up a little, experiment, and make a few ripples. Who knows? A little spice here and there might make waves for your small startup and turn it into one of the most important and most trusted brands in all of Lazada-land.
