- 23/09/2020
- Category: Commentaries
What do both women and men nowadays need, beside food and internet? This opening question line will be answered by beauty products and fashion! Indeed, since 2016 is the rising of e-commerce giants’ momentum, especially in the case of beauty sales in Southeast Asia, many people are connected through the linkage of beauty e-commerce. Opting the belief that penchant of beauty will be aptly growing in positive chart, the e-commerce of beauty industry like Zalora, Lazada (which started from beauty e-commerce), Berrybenka, AVA, WhereYouWant, etc.; have carried on their ways to vastly grow.[1] Of course, the size of markets is not as massive as the beauty markets in China or United States of America, though the popularity continues to flourish and the trend keeps on sporadically expanding.[2] This is not simply a phenomenon that proves that women need to buy make ups, shoes or clothes with easy service that are provided by online platform only. Instead, it is a phenomenon that indicates that startups of beauty market are also increasing the opportunities; gathering high numbers of customers and courier business around the globe.
The rising of beauty e-commerce usage popularity is not only exposed to customers, distributors or sellers and producers only, meanwhile it is also relevant to the greater amount of population using social media or app to simply search online beauty products or even shop online and ship them home. Comprising approximately 150 million digital consumers, the numbers of people in Southeast Asia who purchase products online are higher than the ones who only do research.[3] This fact sheds the optimism to enlarge possibility to nurture impetus in e-commerce specifically in beauty sales. The possibility does not only connect the consumers, producers and distributors, but also embedding comprehensive stratagem to strengthen regional target on economic development, in a frame that we call ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asia Nations).
ASEAN does not explicitly elicit the beauty sale industry growth within the region. Instead, what it does is related to the endorsement of e-commerce in general. Of course, the perception and euphoria of people in ASEAN countries to welcome ASEAN Economic Community 2015 also play crucial role. Amid the higher degree of sophisticating technologies and the higher figure of digital consumers each year, people in ASEAN cannot neglect that their populations are those who actually possess the above-average purchasing power. Demands afterwards are followed up by the ubiquity of local beauty products e-commerce. Furthermore, other e-commerce from other distributor and producer company are set to explore the trade cycle of beauty products within Southeast Asia.
However, big player so far in e-commerce of beauty industries in Southeast Asia, like Zalora, have to still face hurdles that they cannot neglect; other new competitors with more competitive advantages and possibly with new strategies to enter the market.[4] In addition, old players in e-commerce of beauty industries must deal with other obstacles at the same time anyway. Challenges are in language of marketing, high competitiveness, store coverage in the region, government sector bureaucracy issues and finally other competitors from stable industries with big capitals over the market. Taking account the pressure from this group of challenges, e-commerce of beauty industries thus must bear the bitter fact that aiming for beauty e-commerce supremacy in the region of Southeast Asia is a long shot game that has to be developed gradually. Unique strategy of O2O (from Online to Offline) for instance, can create bridge to fulfill the gap of trust that sometimes affect the relation between consumers, distributors and producers by offering direct service from physical offices in several branches with combination of online payment or online transaction.[5] And furthermore, the risks must be minimized by maximizing the loyal customers around the region, so that the customers’ perceptions over the beauty e-commerce are assembled from ‘tryouts’ to ‘trust’ throughout the time.
picture: pexels.com
[1] Leighton Cosseboom, ‘24 trendy Zalora competitors in Southeast Asia’, in TechinAsia.com (online),
https://www.techinasia.com/southeast-asia-zalora-competitors-lists (accessed on 2 August 2016), 3 November 2015
[2] ATKearney, ‘Beauty and the E-Commerce Beast’, in ATKearney (online), https://www.atkearney.com/documents/10192/5357723/Beauty+and+the+E-Commerce+Beast+-+2014+Edition.pdf/dcb3ec25-7274-484d-a9d2-a8f3fe488e4f (accessed on 1 August 2016), 2015
[3] Bain Southeast Asia Digital Consumers Survey, (n=6.278), November 2015; Bain Analysis Euromonitor in Florian Hoppe, Sebastien Lamy, and Alessandro Cannarsi, ‘Can Southeast Asia Live Up to Its E-commerce Potential?’, Bain & Company’s Singapore, http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/can-se-asia-live-up-to-its-ecommerce-potential.aspx (accessed 1 August 2016), 16 March 2016
[4] Sheji Ho and Felicia Moursalien, ‘10 Trends That Will Shape Southeast Asian E-Commerce in 2016’, TechCrunch.com (online),
https://techcrunch.com/2015/12/24/10-predictions-for-southeast-asia-e-commerce-in-2016/ (accessed 30 June 2016), 24 December 2015
[5] “The term O2O derives from abbreviation of from Online to Offline in business model.”
Xia Xing, “The Study of O2O Business Model Development Strategy in SMEs”, in International Journal of Business and Social Science, Vol. 5, No. 9(1) , (New York: Center for Promoting Ideas (CPI), 2014), pp. 296 – 298
