Shopee is the leading e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia – Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Taiwan. It is also one of the leading e-commerce platforms in the world.
It is a platform that tailors the buying experience towards the specific regions it serves, providing customers with an easy, secure and fast way to shop online through strong payment and logistical support.
Shopee was founded in 2015 by Forrest Li and established under the game development and publishing company Garena, one of the subsidiaries of Sea Ltd.
The Future of E-commerce:
Today, Shopee is used by tens of millions of users across Southeast Asia who visit the platform to list products or shop for deals online in a fun, free and trusted way.
The company is also currently expanding through different markets, such as Latin America and Europe, while remaining a staple of e-commerce for the millions it serves in the Southeast Asian region.
While Shopee mainly serves as the important connection between buyer and seller, the company aims to continually enhance its platform and become the region’s e-commerce destination of choice. It plans to do this via ongoing product optimization and localized user-centered strategies.
This adds a few layers to its service, helping consumers buy better and helping sellers gain more exposure for their products, both in a manner not seen by the majority of e-commerce platforms out there.
We spoke with Charmagne Cruz, Shopee Philippines’ Head of Reporting & Analytics, Business Technologies and Pricing, to find out more about Shopee’s success.
What made and still makes Shopee a success?
Obviously, we don’t exist in a silo. E-commerce goes far beyond our borders, and public web data provides access to the vital information that supports our company’s success.
For Shopee in particular, we are investing heavily in trying to understand as well as anticipate market needs and future developments.
We use web data to learn more about our markets, consumer shopping trends, and so on, and we collect this information by leveraging data that is readily available on different public websites.
Without this public data, we have no other way to access this information besides using inefficient processes, such as manually surveying these web data points, which will probably yield inaccurate data overall.
Now, in terms of sales, Shopee is the largest in the region and has created a dominant position in the market. The prominence of the marketplace could be attributed to our efforts to really understand our markets, and this set of information has been vital to our success from the beginning.
What Can You Tell Us About the Partnership with Bright Data? Why Did You Select Bright Data?
We use Bright Data’s platforms to access public web data.
From my experience, what has been invaluable is the service that it provides, as Bright Data really tries to understand its customers. Bright Data has helped us work through ideas of how to collect more web data to meet our growing needs, and through conversations with its support and development staff, we have been able to optimize many of our processes.
As we continually expand into other countries, it’s important that we have the support of our data provider to move faster to address the data needs of all Shopee countries and branches.
So, the excellent service is what I value most. With other data providers, I felt like they just wanted the business, but Bright Data is here to build a long-term relationship.
