LazadaPH: Going through hardships in Ecommerce

Traditional shopping has been around for a while and it helps that online shopping is now an option as well. It gives customers more in control of their time. These consumers are the ones who have unusual lifestyle since they prefer to do everything at night. These are the customers who work during at night and are asleep all day. Their lifestyle is unusual since they are only free when malls are actually closed. They just can't visit the malls anytime they want. They only visit traditional malls during their day off at work. It's more complicated for these consumers unlike if they work on a normal time shift. It's a good thing for them that online shopping is getting popular now in the country. A lot of the offline business models are being translated to online.

As a matter of fact, it only happened last year in the country. Online malls started to show up everywhere when Lazada came in. They are one of the first online stores to grace the local online market. They were also launched in other South East Asia countries. The Ecommerce industry really grew when they arrived in the country compared to the days when the Philippines’ Online Shopping Mall wasn't around yet. The local online scene was never the same again after they arrived. It actually made sense to launch it in the Philippines since the competition is non-competitive. What is very challenging for them is how they can tell the local Internet users to visit their online mall. It’s quite hard to lure online visitors if the impression is negative towards an online mall in general. It makes it harder if customer can’t pay online the conventional way.

Most of the online users are not fan of online payment that's why online users are hard to convert to customers. It's quite hard to shared confidential personal details such as credit card details since it leave us prone from getting stolen by hackers. Sadly, only few of the entire population in the Philippines own a credit card. It's because of this limitation on why Ecommerce never took off in the country. This doesn’t translate for local online users not being familiar with online payment. We don't give Ecommerce websites enough chance since we are close-minded and think only of the risk. It's just plain and simple; we don't trust online malls right away.

For us, all online malls are just put up to scam local Internet users. These two alone will be enough to convince any investor that it will be pretty challenging for them to put up their online business in the local online market. These two Ecommerce problems in the country were single handedly solved by the Philippines' Online Shopping Mall. They were able to come up with Cash on Delivery or C.O.D. as an alternative payment method to their customers. Customers can get to keep their money up until they received their orders at their very homes.