Introduction and About of Shopee

Shopee, is a familiar and popular name that most of us have heard the most in today, especially in Malaysia and the other countries of South East Asia. Shopee has keeping its familiarity starting from the year of 2015, Shopee was growing bigger and bigger in Malaysia. Until now, the year of 2021, Shopee still ranking as the most preferred online shopping and online selling platform in Malaysia. Furthermore, since March 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic in Malaysia, the use of Shopee platform for online shopping and online selling have hit a skyrocket growth.

One of the reason is because of the rules and restrictions that Malaysian government have set, all the residents are not allowed to have gathering, dine in, certain industries are not allow to open the stores and only limited number of people allow to buy the things that they want from the stores and market. The rules are very strict and all the people are strongly encouraged to stay at home. This brings a huge impact for Shopee as most of the buyers and sellers have switched their business and buying behaviour from offline to online and Shopee is one of the most preferred selling and buying platform due to its mobile friendly features and Shopee has gathered many different types of products and sellers together in single platform, so buyers can easily search for the products that they want.

 

Introduction of Shopee

Shopee, also known as Shopee Pte Ltd is a multinational technology company that mainly focuses on the e-commerce sector. Shopee was based in Singapore with the headquartered located under Sea Group in Singapore. Shopee was first launched in the year of 2015 and now has expanded to many countries including Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines. Not only expanded to these countries of South East Asia, but Shopee also focused its business in Taiwan. Shopee is offering tailored platform to the customers and sellers in different region by providing the users with multiple languages to use the platform in different countries such as in Malaysia, users are able to use English, Bahasa Malaysia and Mandarin on Shopee platform. Shopee provides a user-friendly, easy, convenient, secure and fast online shopping experience to the users, with strong payment, fulfilment support as well as strong customer service support.

One of the reason that lead Shopee to success is because of Shopee was believing in the transformative power of the technology and want to change the world better by providing a platform to connect and integrate the buyers and sellers within one community. Shopee aims to offer a one-stop online shopping experience by providing with wide selection of the products, social community for exploration and seamless fulfilment services. Starting from the product categories ranging from consumer electronics, fashion, health, beauty, accessories, home and living, baby and toys and more, customers can easily search and select their preference products, make payment and get their packages in short period of time from Shopee.

 

Business Model

In the platform of Shopee, there are two types of business model that customers and sellers have adopted. The business model that we can see from Shopee is Consumer-to-consumers (C2C) in the early stage. The C2C business model is known as an innovative way which allow customers to buy and sell the products and services with each other. It is a trade between customers with customers or buyers with buyers. For example, a customer bought a dress from a physical store, but she found out that the size is not suitable for her and she want to sell this item to other people, so she can post and publish her dress in Shopee and wait for the customers to place order to purchase the dress. This is call C2C business model.

However in recent years, Shopee has adopted another business model in the platform, which is Business-to-Consumer (B2C) model. Shopee has partnered with more than 70 courier service providers in the Asia market to provide strong logistical supports to their users. With the partnership, the merchants able to ship out their items more easy, convenient and reliable, as well as for the buyers, they able to get lower shipping fees to pay for their orders. This attract many of the merchants, retailers and buyers to use Shopee, so the business model that mostly used in Shopee now is the B2C model. It refers to the sellers directly sell the products and services to the customers, with no any wholesalers, retailers and any middlemen to involve in the transaction. So in Shopee, we can see most of the brand like Hush Puppies, Jean Perry and Watsons, they have an official account in Shopee which the customers can directly buy the items from the official store in Shopee.

 

Shopee Features

Shopee, which is a platform that enables sellers to sell their products and allow buyers to search and buy for their preference products. So in Shopee, there are two different layout of the account for the customers and sellers, which one is the account for sellers and another is for the buyers.

For the buyer’s account, buyer can easily search for the products that they want to buy from the Shopee homepage. Customers can according to the list of category to search for the item like clothes, heath & beauty, baby & toys, mobile & accessories and more. All the related products are categorize together in same category by Shopee so customers are very easy to find the products they want. Besides, customers able to see the discount products, top-selling products, trending products and daily discover products in the homepage. All of these listings are very easy for the customers to track for the products that they prefer to buy.

Another for the seller center account, there are multiple Shopee features that allow sellers to manage their Shopee store. The features included product management, order management, stock management, shipping settings, marketing and promotion, financial report, Shopee chat and more. With all of these features, sellers are able to track and manage their products, orders, stocks, shipment and sales more easily as sellers can manage all of these in just one platform, which is Shopee. Sellers also able to create, edit and uploads all their products that going to sell in Shopee from the seller center account. Process orders, arrange shipment, cancel, do refund for their orders as well as view the financial and sales report for their Shopee store.

All these can conclude that, Shopee is a suitable and well develop platform for the sellers to start and manage their online business as Shopee is already expanded to multiple countries, the customer base is huge as well as Shopee provides strong support to the sellers and buyers.