Mastering E-Commerce Sales Events: A Retailer's Timeline for Success
Unlock the secrets to successful e-commerce sales events in Singapore with our comprehensive preparation timeline and expert tips.
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Everyone has their own favorite online store, and shoppers in Singapore cast their votes with action — by visiting these online shops.
This article rounds up a list of top 10 e-commerce sites in Singapore, ranked based on the amount of monthly traffic at these websites.
We’ve also looked into their growth journeys and strategies to inform yours. Read on to see what you can learn from Singapore’s best e-commerce brands!
Top 10 e-commerce companies in Singapore:
Shopee is an e-commerce site launched in Singapore in 2015. As an online marketplace, it operates with a hybrid business model, enabling both consumer-to-consumer (C2C) and business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions.
The e-commerce unicorn now serves 7 markets in Southeast Asia (SEA), covering Singapore, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam.
Estimated monthly traffic
According to Statista, Shopee receives approximately 16.15 million visits per month.
What to learn from Shopee
Shopee wasn’t a first mover in digital commerce, but it’s certainly one of the largest e-commerce sites in Singapore today. The success of Shopee can be attributed to many factors, one of which is its relentless efforts in launching shopping festival campaigns.
Let’s rewind the clock to the time when Shopee entered the e-commerce scene in Singapore.
At that time, its competitors had already claimed 11.11 and 10.10 (i.e. 11th November and 10th October) for their mega sale events. As a latecomer to the party, Shopee marked the other dates — from 2.2 through 9.9 — for its themed flash sales.
The unceasing drumbeat of shopping festivals brought the city on year-round shopping sprees, and more importantly, consistent boosts to the shopping platform’s traffic, app downloads and gross merchandise value (GMV).
In one recount, the marketplace’s GMV on 9.9 is revealed to be 5X to 10X compared to that of a usual shopping day, and that’s just a conservative estimate.
As time went by, Shopee’s persistent efforts in launching deals and promotions have proved effective in winning a major share in the red ocean. It’s now a leading e-commerce company in Singapore, with the most traffic amongst all players in the industry.
Established in 2012, the now Alibaba-backed Lazada is a pioneer in e-commerce Singapore.
With some 400,000 sellers and 3,000 brands on the marketplace serving over 500 million consumers across SEA, the platform is dubbed the “Amazon of Southeast Asia”.
Estimated monthly traffic
Lazada Singapore has an estimated monthly traffic of 9.21 million.
What to learn from Lazada
Lazada believes in the notion that positive experiences nurture loyal customers. It’s only when customers trust and love the platform that they’ll come back for more.
“When consumers turn online, the last thing we want is to deliver poor service or to not meet their expectations.”
- James Chang, CEO of Lazada Singapore
To achieve this goal, Lazada invests heavily in technology and infrastructure.
For instance, the online shopping platform adopts a mobile-first experience, and offers diverse payment methods for customers to choose from; its grocery arm, RedMart, has turned to automated fulfillment for improved speed, efficiency and accuracy; and Lazada e-Logistics boasts 72-hour cross-border delivery for major metropolitan cities in SEA.
In brief, Lazada in Singapore handles every aspect of the online shopping experience with great care.
From payment to order fulfillment and delivery, every step is carefully curated and optimized to create delightful experiences that will make happy customers return.
Coming from the West, Amazon also holds a dominant stake in e-commerce Singapore. The American retail giant was born in 1994, as an online shop for books, before pivoting to become a fully-fledged marketplace for all sorts of things.
Amazon made its foray into Southeast Asia in 2017 with its Prime services, with Singapore being its point of first entry. Its Singapore site, Amazon.sg, launched two years later in 2019.
As the new kid in town, the e-commerce company was quick to rise to be on par with the homegrown competitors, rising to top 4 position in terms of monthly web traffic by Q4 of 2019.
The site then overtook Qoo10, a Singapore-based e-commerce site, to become the third most popular online shopping website in Singapore by the end of 2020.
Estimated monthly traffic
Amazon is the third-most visited e-commerce site in Singapore, with around 5.16 million visits per month.
What to learn from Amazon
Some analysts ascribe the success of Amazon in Singapore to its localization strategy.
The reason behind this move can be linked to Singaporean consumers’ shopping preferences.
More than 50% of respondents in a survey say they’d support local merchants if there are no price differences between the products offered by local and international sellers.
“With Amazon.sg, we want to provide what customers have been asking us for: the ability for everyone to shop on the desktop and mobile, more local and international selection from Amazon and trusted sellers, paired with fast and reliable delivery.”
- Henry Low, country manager for Singapore at Amazon
Against this backdrop, the Amazon team makes it clear that support of local businesses is one of their top priorities.
In 2020, some 12,000 small businesses in Singapore were invited to join Prime Day, Amazon’s annual sale event for its Prime members. The move, despite being a strategic one, found favor with Singaporean consumers.
Amazon.sg now offers a vast array of products, sourced both locally and from overseas, to consumers in Singapore.
But let’s not forget that the “foreign” kid tried very hard to “fit in” before it could win the hearts of the locals — and that’s something to keep in mind when you go after cross-border e-commerce.
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Launched in 2010 and formerly known as GMarket, Qoo10 is another prominent name in the e-commerce space in Singapore.
Similar to its peers, Qoo10 is a one-stop marketplace for a wide variety of products, such as fashion items, food and personal care.
Estimated monthly traffic
The monthly traffic of Qoo10 is estimated to be 3.21 million.
What to learn from Qoo10
Having set foot in the e-commerce space early, Qoo10 enjoys an early mover advantage against its rivals.
For instance, it appealed to Singaporean consumers with its group buy offer, which allowed customers to make purchases at significantly lower prices when minimum order quantities were met. It also introduced online auctions, at which users could bid for items posted online.
While these features were a novelty back in the early days of e-commerce, some are of the view that Qoo10 failed to stay on top of competition as time passed by. New entrants, such as Lazada and Shopee, quickly replicated the market leader’s platform features and strategies.
On top of replication, they incorporated the concept of “shoppertainment” in online shopping, such as in-app games and live streaming, as well as promotional events that drew customers away, causing the incumbent to take a backseat to younger e-commerce companies.
If there’s a lesson to learn from Qoo10, it’s that innovation is key.
Being an early mover in your niche certainly gives you a headstart, but it’s the ability to constantly innovate and improve that would yield sustained growth and long-term success.
Castlery is a start-up company, founded in 2013 by an ex-investment banker, providing fine furniture to homeowners.
Born in Singapore, the direct-to-consumer (D2C) brand now sells in some 50 metropolitan areas across Singapore, Australia and the United States.
Estimated monthly traffic
Castlery’s online store now has 1.38 million monthly visitors in Singapore.
What to learn from Castlery
If there’s a textbook for D2C commerce, Castlery would be the perfect example for it.
Departing from the conventional B2B or B2C business models, the Singaporean brand makes its own furniture. It manages and owns the entire supply chain, so everything from product design, sourcing, manufacturing and retail stays within its control.
The direct-to-consumer approach enables the company to eliminate any middlemen — and layers of markups — between itself and consumers.
As such, the startup company connects directly to its end customers, bringing quality furniture to the masses at affordable price ranges.
Zooming out of this case example and looking at the e-commerce space as a whole, pursuing a D2C model appears to be the future of retail businesses.
Disintermediation not only yields better profit margins, but also helps cultivate closer business-to-consumer relationships as you can get your brand messaging directly through to your loyal customers.
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ezbuy, formerly 65daigou, was set up in 2010 as a “daigou” (meaning “buying on behalf'') platform in Singapore.
At that time, buying from Taobao, the China-based online shopping platform, was popular but cumbersome for non-natives.
To buy from Taobao, Singapore-based shoppers had to figure out the language used on the Chinese site, check if the stores would ship to their country, and bear the risks of buying from subpar sellers.
In view of these challenges, ezbuy emerged to solve the pains of Singaporean shoppers, helping them buy and move the goods to Singapore for wider accessibility by the avid consumers.
Over time, the Singapore-based e-commerce company has evolved to become a cross-border shopping platform. With its online marketplace, ezbuy connects local shoppers to global brands and sellers from China, Taiwan, Korea, the United States and many other places.
Estimated monthly traffic
ezbuy gets approximately 0.88 million visitors per month.
What to learn from ezbuy
Compared with Shopee’s aggressive rise to the pole position and Amazon’s successful entry in a foreign market, ezbuy’s brand story may not immediately strike us as inspirational. The shopping platform’s ability to adapt to changes, however, is admirable.
The earliest instance of ezbuy’s exceptional adaptability can be traced to 2016, when it rebranded from “65daigo” to ezbuy.
It was the time when competitors like Shopee and Lazada came along, the team realized that simply being a “Taobao agent” wasn’t scalable. They therefore put on the global lens and developed the e-commerce site for products from brands and sellers around the world.
More recently during the Covid-19 pandemic, regional lockdowns and supply chain disruptions caused the cross-border shopping platform to suffer serious blows.
Amid these restrictions, ezbuy shifted the focus to onboarding local digital merchants, increasing the number of local sellers by 3X in just one year.
From being a modest daigou platform to a cross-border online shopping site, ezbuy has come a long way in digital commerce.
It faced a number of headwinds along the way, but it’s the extraordinary agility and adaptability that helped it gain a place in the list of top 10 e-commerce sites in Singapore today.
COURTS is a retailer specializing in consumer electronics and furniture.
With roots in the United Kingdom, COURTS set foot in Singapore in 1974 and has built a network of more than 10 brick-and-mortar stores nationwide.
Its online store first launched in 2017, and is among the 10 most popular e-commerce sites today.
Estimated monthly traffic
On average, COURTS’s e-commerce site has 0.87 million visitors each month.
What to learn from COURTS
COURTS is a vivid example of how a decades-old brand undergoes digital transformation and redesigns the retail experience.
In the past, shopping was done mostly in COURTS’s physical retail stores. But as the consumers’ appetite for online shopping grew, the retailer felt the need to go digital, too.
It therefore enlisted the help of an e-commerce agency to revamp its e-commerce site, and rolled out a number of features to make the shopping experience quicker and easier.
For instance, COURTS’s click-and-collect feature allowed customers to place orders online and pick up their items offline. This doesn’t only create a consistent, omnichannel experience across different customer touchpoints, but also offers greater convenience and flexibility on the ways that people shop.
ZALORA is a leading e-tailer of fashion and lifestyle products based in Southeast Asia, with operations in Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.
The online store offers fashion items from more than 3,000 brands, such as Adidas, Birkenstock, Under Armour, VANS and many more.
Estimated monthly traffic
The e-commerce site has an estimated monthly web traffic of 0.79 million.
What to learn from ZALORA
Despite being a retailer of apparel and accessories, ZALORA says it’s a “data first, then fashion” company. In fact, the brand’s approach to marketing and growth is consistent with what it touts.
As an e-commerce seller, ZALORA holds a massive repository of data — and the company is very good at turning data into actionable insights.
For example, marketers leverage on historical data to understand customers’ purchasing behavior and optimize their marketing strategies to target the right audience.
Fashion designers, on the other hand, learn about trending colors, styles and materials to be woven into the next season’s collection.
Furthermore, ZALORA recently opened up its data platform (called Trender) to its suppliers, empowering digital merchants to capitalize on customer and transactional data previously accessible only by the shopping platform itself.
“As an e-commerce company, our success lies in data analytics capability and agility to respond to the fast-changing consumer demands and the pandemic has brought to light this need. We now want to help build that same data culture across brands and work together to increase data maturity.”
- Vasudha Sarda, former senior business intelligence analyst at ZALORA
As the case of ZALORA has illustrated, data analytics is a powerful tool that would help optimize many aspects of an online business. Trend forecasting is crucial in the fashion industry, and data is an important source of insight for marketers as well.
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Love, Bonito is another clothing brand loved by fashion-conscious consumers.
Co-founded in 2010 by Rachel Lim (at the young age of 19) and her friends, the brand has a focus on women’s wear for Asians.
Estimated monthly traffic
Around 0.68 million people visit the website of Love, Bonito every month.
What to learn from Love, Bonito
Love, Bonito is a brand with a strong sense of mission, and the advocacy of causes has found favor with its female audiences.
An example to illustrate this is the production of garments in “Asian sizing” at Love, Bonito.
Starting out, the fashion retailer’s co-founders imported clothes from overseas. But they soon found that global fashion brands often catered to the sizes and shapes of European consumers, not Asians.
It was this realization that prompted the female entrepreneurs to create clothing just for women in Asia, tailoring apparel to their skin tones, physique and preferences.
Taking their advocacy of women's rights to further heights, the Asian fashion brand launched a social impact program called LBCreate.
Amongst the activities organized under the canvas of LBCreate, highlights include breast cancer awareness campaigns, funding for female education, and clothing donation to women in poverty.
In the eyes of consumers, Love, Bonito is a socially responsible e-commerce company. It cares about women, gives back to society, and strives to create social impact across the globe.
Support of social causes is ingrained in the brand’s DNA, and this is central to the success of the multimillion-dollar fashion empire.
Established in 1995 and headquartered in the United States, eBay also has a strong digital presence in Singapore.
Simply put, eBay is an online site that facilitates auctions and consumer-to-consumer sales. Anyone can open an eBay account for free, and sell new or used items.
Estimated monthly traffic
eBay gets around 0.42 million monthly visits in Singapore.
What to learn from eBay
Looking into eBay’s business strategy, it’s not difficult to find that the online retail giant earns its edge through cost leadership.
In the crowded online marketplace, intense competition among sellers drives prices down. Competitive product prices then draw customers to the platform, which in turn attract more users on the supply side.
Another factor behind the popularity of eBay is the concept of “recommerce”, which refers to the sale of used or previously owned goods on online marketplaces.
In fact, according to eBay’s Recommerce Report, one-third (34%) of the platform’s users cite sustainability as a motivating factor for buying second-hand items on the site.
Many of the world’s greatest companies are born out of basements, and similar instances can be found in the aforementioned e-commerce brands In Singapore.
The founder of ezbuy used to pack and ship parcels from her tiny apartment, and Love, Bonito was built with a “loan” from the life savings of the co-founder’s mother.
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Unlock the secrets to successful e-commerce sales events in Singapore with our comprehensive preparation timeline and expert tips.
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