Shopee is a Singaporean electronics-based company that focuses on e-commerce across multiple nations. Serving over 5 countries, it has become the biggest store across South East Asia, allowing businesses to sell different range of products that offers a variety of choices to customers.
Its popularity has risen steadily as sales numbers increases every year and this is mostly due to their marketing strategy that they have implemented for themselves. While it may seem complex at times, it has proven to be worth their effort. So how does Shopee advertise themselves to achieve their competitive edge among other online stores?
Price & Promotions
Shopee is well-known for its affordable prices and constant promotions every month. This drives users to buy as many items from the shop in one seating and rewards them for buying more by giving points, vouchers, additional discounts and free shipping nationwide.
With new promotions coming in every season, users have every reason to hype for the next big sale. All Shopee needs to do is to push an advertising campaign of the next sale through different platforms like television, social media and billboards to make people aware of it and feel excited for the day to come.
Video Commercial
One of Shopee’s marketing strategies involves making video commercials and airing them on multiple platforms like television, social media, YouTube. They are always made and filmed in a colourful palette and are mostly followed with a catchy tune to attract people’s attention and make their commercials memorable in their minds.
They also collaborate with celebrities like actors, artist and athletes to promote their brand so they could reach out to a wider audience. While they are often criticized for being loud and cringy, it does work in making sure that the name of their brand will still ring and remind them when new sales are coming.
Community
Shopee doesn’t just offer products to sell to customers, but creates an experience for them through their app and site. It functions as a social media for people to share and chat among themselves or with the seller directly to ask further questions on their product. Other features include live-streaming and in-app video games to earn rewards and discounts.
It is also seller-friendly as it provides features to track down sales performance, create vouchers, manage ads and access to marketing tools to better understand their business so they could learn to improve. These types of user-friendly features don’t just encourage users to buy from the platform, but also encourages them to sell their products through them.
Mobile Focused
People nowadays use smartphones daily and to make the experience of shopping online enjoyable for users, Shopee focuses a lot of their resources on making the mobile app fully equipped with user-friendly features. This is to create a more engaging experience by taking advantage of the current digital climate.
Most online shoppers, especially Shopee users, shop via their smartphones. To accommodate, Shopee enable features like browsing and ordering products, making payments, tracking delivery statuses and review their products while taking pictures as proof, all from the comfort of your phone.
Localization
Shopee is available across the South East Asian region, but not every country is similar to each other in terms of purchasing patterns and consumer behaviours. To fit in with each country, Shopee creates separate departments for each country and market to them based on what would be relevant to a specific segment of audience.
By understanding each country’s own market, they are able to respond to their needs and tailor certain ads to their taste. Such examples include collaborating with a local famous celebrity, create seasonal sales based on local public holidays, and expanding their services to specific groups of people like giving Muslim shoppers a separate platform to purchase Muslim-friendly products.