Shopee is one of the leading e-commerce platforms in the world. It is a platform used by tens of millions of users across the globe who visit the marketplace to list products or shop for deals online.
Shopee is currently expanding through different markets, such as Latin America and Europe, while remaining a staple of e-commerce for the millions it serves throughout the Southeast Asian region.
I’m a Data Engineer from the Business Intelligence team here at Shopee Colombia, and our department’s job is to tailor the Shopee model to fit the specific needs of the South American landscape.
Currently, we have two types of clients: Buyers and Sellers.
The current challenge we face for our buyers is recommending, as well as listing, products they are searching for at lower prices than they would find on other platforms. For our sellers, the challenge is to boost their presence and offerings by helping them reach out to new and existing customers. They look for ways to advertise their products in a targeted and more methodical manner.
Considering Shopee Colombia serves as the important connection between buyer and seller in the Latin American region, we aim to continually enhance our platform to become the region’s e-commerce destination of choice via ongoing product optimization and localized user-centered strategies.
Our main target is to sell low-cost products by offering unique options for our consumers, such as free shipping or limited time offers that we invite our sellers to participate in, to help our buyers find products at really cheap prices on the marketplace — essentially increasing exposure for our marketplace, as well as our sellers, by offering enticing offers for new and existing users to browse through, which will lead to increased acquisition.
We use public web data in order to carve out a market advantage within the regions we serve. This helps us 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.
Web data is important in our business because it allows us to reach more sellers and increase their revenue using Shopee as their virtual storefront. We collect web data in order to gather the insights we need to recommend products that are attractive to our buyers, and provide sellers with solutions to optimize their product offerings to serve this unique region.
We are currently using Bright Data’s Web Scraper IDE to collect public web data from social media channels to identify different influencers that are advertising products that may be of interest to the buyers on our platform.
We also use web data gathered from the platform to perform actions such as price comparison, SEO and so on and so forth. This helps gain further exposure to our marketplace, as well as our range of products.
When searching for a data provider, we began browsing for a vendor that would be able to provide us with different types of solutions that would fit the unique requirements of our projects, considering we have a large operation spanning multiple continents.
Each one of them has specific needs and specific data that fits the context of the market, so for us, it was important to have multiple sources of information that can adjust to our needs.
Also, we needed a data provider that can provide multiple paths or solutions that can integrate with our own data collection tools, to create new processes that can be automated.
Overall, the partnership with Bright Data has helped us grow our data sources to create decision-making processes that are based on multiple sources of information — allowing us to gain strategic advantages and accelerate our growth in new markets.
One of the benefits of working with Bright Data is the multiple solutions it offers. Not only its no-code solutions, but also the possibility of being able to modify the services provided to meet our specific needs.
This is on top of the speed at which we are able to obtain this information, which is vital to the success of our organization and the emerging needs of our business.
But the main selling point was the easy integration into our own system, as well as the pay-as-you-go payment structure that we are contracted under. This allows us to limit our expenditures, while still having the ability to access the web data we need to power our own platform.
