Shopee new initiatives to empower digital retail in 2022

Southeast Asia’s largest e-Commerce platform, Shopee and its brand partners continue to experience positive growth despite the challenges brought on by the pandemic. Five brands partners of Shopee achieved a gross merchandise value (GMV) of at least US$ 100 million in 2021. The five Shopee partners, L’Oreal Group, Oppo, Realme, Samsung, and Xiaomi, have now made it into the Shopee 100 Million Dollar Club.

Last year, Shopee launched the Regional Champion Brands Programme and worked closely with the brand partners to co-create regional campaigns that saw great success, making up almost one-fifth of participating brands’ annual GMV.  Following the success, Shopee will continue to support the 20 brand partners onboarded this year with priority access to new initiatives and campaigns that will deliver high business impact.

Speaking at the Shopee Brand Summit, Terence Pang, CEO of Shopee said as retail becomes hyper-digital and shopping online becomes integral to people’s lives, Shopee believes that there is huge room for growth in this region. He added that by working together with brand partners, they will continue to expand and enhance Shopee Mall to serve more customers and scale to greater heights.

In the last two years, Shopee Mall saw an eight-time increase in the number of users shopping online at least once a month. The e-Commerce platform expects the trend to continue and is now planning to boost its efforts across key growth drivers to widen its reach, as well as strengthen engagement with users on the platform.

Shopee plans to do this in three ways. They are as follows.

Increasing brand awareness through broader marketing efforts

This includes mega shopping events and new Shopee Premium regional campaigns. The Shopee Premium campaign has achieved eight times growth in traffic, and shoppers outside Tier-1 cities contribute to more than 50% of purchases.

Shopee is also building a new sampling channel that enables shoppers to buy sample-size products. Piloted during their 12.12 shopping event, the sampling channel managed to recruit up to 90% of new buyers.

Driving higher business performance with innovative solutions

Shopee has also expanded its suite of marketing solutions and tools to optimize marketing impact and returns for businesses. This includes collaboration with Meta to be one of the first e-commerce platforms to integrate Facebook Ads for the region’s largest community of online sellers.

Brands on Shopee Mall can now purchase homepage banner display ads to showcase their campaigns, giving them the highest exposure in-app and helping to drive on-site traffic to their store and products. Last year, sales generated by Shopee Ads increased by 200%. Brands can now access more insights on shopper demographics and segmentation to customize their e-commerce and marketing strategies.

Elevating brand experiences with upgraded engagement tools

Shopee will also be upgrading its popular suite of shopper engagement features to continue delivering more immersive, personalized, and entertaining experiences that contribute to deeper brand affinity and loyalty.

The Shopee Beauty Cam for example is an AR-enabled makeup try-on-tool that has helped drive conversions up to three times higher for beauty brands. Shopee will also be using AI to recommend more personalized shoppertainment content and deals based on shopping behavior and user interests.

The e-Conomy SEA report has projected the Southeast Asian region to have a GMV towards US$ 1 trillion by 2030. As such, the e-Commerce industry in Southeast Asia is only expected to grow and be more competitive as emerging technologies enable better experiences for consumers. For platforms like Shopee, tapping into these technologies will surely only keep them ahead of the pact.