Lazada Review: How Cash on Delivery changed Ecommerce

Online shopping has been around for quite some while now in the country. A lot of the local consumers have already diverted to online shopping and barely does offline shopping already. With the emergence of online malls here and there, online shopping is reaching all-time high in popularity in the local online community. The great thing about this trending is that online malls are way convenient than traditional malls like SM. On these offline malls, we usually get tired just walking around and at times end up realizing that what we want to buy is not available. This is the advantage of online shopping as you can do it whenever you are.

One website that is established in the local online stage is Lazada Philippines. They just launched last year but already is the main player in the local Ecommerce industry. At the time of their arrival, online shopping was still not this big. It only started to rise after they arrived in the Philippines. Since they arrived in the country, other competitors were launched out of nowhere. It’s a great change for us in online scene where we usually just go online to communicate or if we are in need of information and watch videos. But now we can also go online to shop, how cool is that? It has been around dating back in the early 2000. However, the country didn’t adopt along with the other countries where it’s already a lifestyle. We only adopted last year. Despite that span, the growth and results of Ecommerce tremendously increased while dramatically supplanted previous year’s Ecommerce growth combined.

I think a lot of this has to do with payment method that is available in the country. Traditionally, it’s via credit card or paypal account that a customer can pay online. But in our country, we also have other unconventional payment methods such as Cash on Delivery or much well known as C.O.D. This payment method is very unusual to be offered online. It has been a successful payment method already before Internet was even born in the country. Although it was only offered for food delivery to customers only then, offering this same payment method online is a different story.

The risk of offering Cash on Delivery in online gives the business a very high risk. The reward for this is very high on the brighter side. This also quickens their credibility to their customers since they won’t need to worry if the online store they are buying from is a scam. In case orders don’t get delivered, they still get to keep their money. Unlike the other way around, if a fake customer orders from them, they have already spent money on delivery and even paid for the item in advance in case they run out of stock and bought it from their supplier. It’s the reason why it is rarely offered in online.

The good thing about Lazada is that it actually was a success for them. It quickly built their brand and fast-forward their success in less than a year. Thanks to their efforts and initiative it opened the local customers eyes to online shopping.