Chris feng, ceo shopee, head of mobile business, garena online.
Chris feng, ceo shopee, head of mobile business, garena online.
"Five years ago, we had around 10% traffic coming from mobile, right now, we’re talking about 70% or even more..."
How is Southeast Asia different from other regions when it comes to peer-to-peer e-commerce?
I think the key difference is, e-commerce in Southeast Asia- compared with East Asia (China or Korea), or more developed countries like the US or in Europe – Southeast Asia is less developed. Second, if you look within Southeast Asia, some countries are more forward-looking, like Singapore or Malaysia. Countries like Indonesia, or Thailand, or The Philippines are a little bit less developed, both in terms of infrastructure and people’s familiarity with the industry.
Thirdly, I believe Southeast Asia’s future would probably move towards China’s model (of e-commerce), rather than the US model, mainly because I think offine retail business (here) is less developed compared with more developed countries like the US or Europe. It’s very similar to what was going on in China 10 to 15 years ago, which actually gave us a bigger opportunity to come in to fulfi ll an untapped demand of retail and commerce.
Before apps, peer-to-peer selling has been the norm in online forums and more recently, social network groups. Why does Shopee choose to enter the scene at this time?
What I believe is, when we do a business, I think we need to follow the wave of the market. If you go too ahead of the wave, you can’t surf – there’s no wave to carry you forward. If you’re too late, then there are too many competitors, or there’s simply not enough strength to pull you forward. I think if you look at the market right now, one indication we can see is mobile penetration. I used to run other B2C e-commerce businesses, five years ago, we had around 10% traffic coming from mobile.
Right now, we’re talking about 70% or even more, which clearly shows that people spend more time on a mobile device. At the same time, we also observed that in many countries, like Indonesia or Vietnam, the Philippines, and even to some extent Thailand, people’s first device is a mobile device rather than a PC. That’s why we looked at it and thought that we need to tackle the bigger part of the market first. I think that any business, as the market gets big enough, there’s a huge potential to be professionalized.
You know, you can do many different things on a forum – but it’s not professional. I still remember the days I spent time on HardwareZone, because that was the only place where all the fans discussed different things – how did you put different parts together, what did they buy, and how did they overclock their CPUs.
I think that’s fine, because it was a niche segment. As time goes, more and more people are willing to buy and sell, then the question rises – is the forum a right place? Can we make the experience better? Ultimately, it’s the number of people who want sellersto do it and whether we can make it more professionalized.
What’s the biggest challenge Shopee is facing on this platform?
First of all, it’s to educate the market on what’s the best way to interact with buyers and sellers. The challenge differs country by country. For example, in countries like Thailand, people are quite familiar with selling on Instagram or Facebook, and customer service is quite normal for them. But what they are learning is how to manage inventory in a larger scale, or send the item to somewhere far away with a different logistics system.
For countries like Singapore, they need to learn how to use escrow. For the seller, it’s always better for them to always get the money immediately, but we protect the buyers as well, so it’s an educating process for us. Secondly, ecosystem building for us is important – we don’t want too many wrong people in the platform. We want it to grow, but at the same time, how do we make sure the people on our platform in the ecosystem are healthy people? For example, we don’t want a typical Lazada smartphone wholeseller to use our platform.
If the customer wants to inquire about phones, they don’t reply or serve the customer. So how I balance that, and who I bring to the platform is very important. I use my judgment, as time goes on, and country by country, we measure detailed metrics on our sellers, for an overall ecosystem average and how it looks like.
