Southeast Asia’s biggest one-day sale, the 11.11 Shopping Festival, has resulted in 15 days worth of transactions in just 24 hours in the Philippines for online e-commerce platform Lazada.
“People visit our app at least 20 times a day during our 11.11 sale. We will do in one day what we normally do in half a month,” said Lazada Philippines chief executive officer Juan Pavez in an interview at Lazada’s flagship warehouse in the country in Cabuyao, Laguna.
The volume of transactions processed yesterday was no small feat – a prelude, Pavez said, to the 12.12 Christmas sale on Dec. 12.
The Philippine e-commerce market is expected to grow to $6 billion, a 17 percent year-on-year increase. The number becomes even more mind-boggling if you divide it by the number of days in a year, and Lazada, which is the number one shopping and selling destination in Southeast Asia, has also cornered the lion’s share of domestic transaction value.
“We achieved 60 percent of our daily target by 9 a.m.,” Pavez said. “For many Filipinos, our 11.11 sale is the best time to shop for Christmas, with over 50 million deals, including discounts of as much as 99 percent and even one-peso deals.”
The Cabuyao warehouse, which has a storage capacity of up to 5 million items, was transformed into a 54,000 square meter Santa’s factory in preparation for the holiday rush.
Setting up warehouses across the country – with two more in Mandaue City in Cebu and in Davao City – as well as 50 distribution centers where products land before the so-called last-mile delivery, was part of Lazada’s efforts to consolidate its logistics and supply chain.
“We want to become a technology-driven platform that enables sellers and satisfies buyers. This is why we have decided to invest in our warehouses and our fleet. We want to control the logistics and the supply chain so we can ensure fast and secure delivery,” Pavez said.
“Because we are so confident of our logistics backend platform, we even launched the guaranteed next day delivery because we control the logistics, which is a key factor to overall customer experience,” he added.
Pavez said Lazada is eyeing a new facility in Clark to maximize the cross-border flows afforded by Subic and Clark, especially with the anticipated increase in domestic flights operating from the special economic zone.
“When we started in the Philippines six years ago, everybody told us we were crazy,” said Pavez, who reported that the online platform now has 27 million Facebook fans in the Philippines and receives 28 million site visits.
“But we believe in the market, and that e-commerce is an enabler of business, including small and medium enterprises,” Pavez added. With Nat Mariano and Angelica Villanueva