Lazada Birthday Bash: What You Need to Know as a Seller

The leading six countries that visited Lazada in 2023 were all Southeast Asian countries, with 35 million visiting from the Philippines alone—the highest overall. And a massive chunk of the shopping and sales comes during the most awaited sale of the year—the Lazada birthday sale. Like other significant sales, Lazada birthday bash offers its shoppers a bonanza of deals, cashback, and vouchers that attract high-intent shoppers keen on buying from sellers who offer the best deals.. 

As an e-commerce seller, capitalising on this opportunity can bring you abundant sales and revenue and help you achieve success unlike any other time of the year. However, challenges ranging from inventory stockouts due to a surge in sales volumes to shipping delays can negatively impact the shopping experience and hurt your online store rating. We walk you through how to prepare for the upcoming Lazada birthday sale, bring more shoppers to your storefront and convert touchpoints into definitive sale opportunities. 

When is the Lazada Birthday Sale

Lazada celebrates its birthday on the 12th of March every year, and 2024 happens to be the 12th year since it began its operations. It is a month-long celebration that involves some of the best discounts, promotions, cashback offers, and vouchers to woo shoppers who prepared their wishlists ahead and are eyeing great deals on products they’d like to buy. The sale kicks off with the 3.3 sale and lasts until the 27th of March. The “Bonggang Birthday Fest” from March 3-7 starts off the celebrations, followed by ongoing deals and a big “Bonggang Birthday Sale” between March 24-27. Throughout the month, Lazada offers flash deals, specific category days, and other sales and promotions. 

How does the Lazada Birthday Sale Benefit Sellers

The Lazada birthday sale 2024 is a goldmine of deals and discounts curated for shoppers, but what’s in store for an e-commerce business?

• Deep discounts and promotions: The deep discount feature is only the tip of the iceberg. The platform also offers extra discounts across all its operating counties. In Malaysia, Lazada is offering a birthday bonus of RM 10 off every RM 100 spent this month. Moreover, customers can get up to 60% cashback through Lazcoin. With platform-wide discounts in place, Lazada will run its own campaigns, making it a level-playing field for new and upcoming brands requiring much-needed visibility to reach more shoppers. 
• Free shipping vouchers: One of the most lucrative ways to inspire sales during Lazada’s birthday week is through the many free shipping vouchers. The platform also offers savings vouchers for all its customers. However, stacking these vouchers is generally prohibited, with the exception of the 3rd to 5th of March. During these dates, Lazada is also offering you the chance to stack vouchers for extra savings!
• Increased customer traffic and purchase intent: Customer traffic sees an unusual rise during this month. Moreover, these customers are keen on making purchases. As e-commerce sellers on the platforms, it can be incredibly wise to position your store so that you can reap the benefits of this influx of eager buyers.
• Additional marketing and promotional efforts from Lazada: Needless to say, the birthday sale is one of Lazada’s biggest events. Therefore, the platform remains ahead of the curve in terms of marketing the sale. Moreover, the platform also randomly selects stores to promote, allowing certain stores to stand out more than others.
• Ripe Opportunity for Cross-border Selling: The Lazada Birthday bash isn’t limited to one geographical area. It is applicable across all the regions they operate in. This is a more than favourable opportunity for any seller operating within the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore. And if you don’t operate across borders, consider taking your business to these regions to establish your presence quickly and effectively.
• Expansion of the change-of-mind return policy: In tandem with the Lazada birthday sale, the marketplace has also announced the expansion of the change-of-mind return policy to more categories. Shoppers are also allowed to cancel their orders before their delivery is confirmed, offering greater flexibility. So, sellers no longer have to spend money on shipping, only also to arrange returns.

Challenges Sellers could face during the Lazada Birthday Sale 2024

The Lazada Birthday Sale of 2024 is rife with opportunities for sellers and shoppers alike. However, the exciting prospects come at a price for all sellers on the platform. Below, we discuss some of these challenges further. 

• Shipping Delays: Brands can experience a higher-than-usual influx of orders during the Lazada birthday sale. In-house logistics or manually managing orders would overwhelm your team, causing picking, packing, and shipping delays. Shipping delays are the killers of an e-commerce business, and the influx of orders ensures that you run into them. Furthermore, it can be incredibly difficult to organise these orders, and delays in this leg of fulfilment may result in brands missing cut-offs for same-day and next-day deliveries. 
• Last-mile carriers overwhelmed with requests: Last-mile deliveries are often the most complex, primarily because of the many considerations, such as delivery speed and delivery capabilities. During the sale days, these last-mile carriers run out of capacity to fulfil all your usual requests, let alone additional ones. 
• Increased Order Volume and Fulfillment Challenges: The sales season often creates a shortage of stocks since it is tough to predict the rise in sales during this time. Moreover, brands that can offer additional discounts over platform discounts often receive an overwhelming number of orders from shoppers. This results in brands running out of stock or being unable to map inventory to specific channels
• Inventory management challenges:  Stockouts can also be caused due to improper inventory management. While dealing with multiple sales channels or poor inventory visibility, brands may miss out on replenishing their stock ahead of the sale. This could be due to a number of reasons, such as having multiple tools to manage different sales channels, not unifying online and offline channels, and poor inventory and demand forecasting.
• Competitive deals from rival brands: In addition to the many inventory and delivery-related challenges, businesses also stand to lose business during the Lazada birthday sale if they aren’t able to offer deals that rival those of other competitors in the space. Most e-commerce brands in Southeast Asia may have a limited budget for sales for competitive deals due to costly overheads like renting warehouses, labour costs, and relying on a single logistics partner.

Scripting success during the Lazada Birthday Sale 2024 with a 3PL

Challenges are a given, no matter what industry you operate in. However, they aren’t unsolvable. In the case of an e-commerce operation, opting for a 3PL that offers you comprehensive solutions can help eliminate a chunk of these problems and open up room for you to focus on things other than fulfilment and logistics.

• Efficient order fulfilment to handle the increased sales volume: During the Lazada birthday sale season, your online store will see increased footfall. Your 3PL must be able to proactively absorb that surge in orders and keep up with the fulfilment expectations as promised. Hence, it is best to prepare your store by choosing a 3PL that can accommodate your growing stock handling and allocate resources and staffing to pick, pack and ship out orders to meet the fulfilment timelines and avoid delays during Lazada’s birthday sale. 
• Warehousing network to ensure timely delivery: Ensure that the 3PL you opt for has a well-distributed network of warehouses. This will help you distribute your inventory according to demand in certain areas and be in proximity to your active shoppers, speeding up your fulfilment timelines.
• Inventory management using OMS to ensure stock availability: During the Lazada birthday sale, you don’t want to lose out on precious revenue due to minor issues such as stockouts. With a 3PL such as Locad, you have access to a well-designed order management system that can help you keep track of your inventory, accept demand forecast predictions for resource management and have real-time visibility to replenish items headed for stockouts.
• Faster delivery times with varied last-mile options: With a 3PL, last-mile delivery fulfilment becomes easy. In fact, you can either choose a fixed last-miler or let our order management system auto-assign an affordable last-miler to fulfil an order.
• Reduced costs and improved margins by optimizing logistics: Logistics and fulfilment costs can often hold up massive portions of your profits. Furthermore, transportation charges and unmanaged inventory can cost many precious dollars in sales. Unified logistics for online and offline selling, storage and direct store delivery can help offer improved margins all around. So, opt for a logistics solution that offers you appropriate insight into your stock levels and options across last-mile fulfilment.

Wrapping Up

Logistical hurdles should not prevent you from scaling your business during the Lazada birthday sale. Partner with a 3PL solution like Locad and experience unprecedented success. A 3PL that takes care of order management, automated order processing, mid-mile, and fulfilment can offer your e-commerce business the kind of value that will help you confidently face the onslaught of the sales season. 

For e-commerce to succeed during a peak day of sales like the Lazada birthday sale, a 3PL can assist you in scaling up when the demand increases, bring in more sales through multichannel selling, explore new markets through cross-border without worrying about expensive and fixed infrastructure and limited logistics carriers. Additionally, you can leverage the expertise and infrastructure available to free up time that otherwise would be spent determining the in-house logistics. 

Unsure about in-house logistics and want to switch to a 3PL for the Lazada Birthday Bash?  Chat with our Team today!