New survey data from e-commerce platform Lazada shows that 57% of shoppers in Southeast Asia (SEA) go directly to e-commerce sites when browsing for purchases, driving traffic away from social media and search engines.
According to Lazada Sponsored Solutions (LSS)’s recently-released thought leadership report, “Transforming Southeast Asia: From Discovery to Delivery”, e-commerce user penetration is set to hit 413 million users by 2025, buoyed by a rise in direct traffic to e-commerce marketplaces.
Lazada sees this trend away from search engines and social media as underscoring the significance of e-commerce marketing solutions and the digitization of companies amid rising interest rates and inflation across global markets.
“E-commerce marketplaces like Lazada have surpassed social media and search engines to become the discovery channel of choice,” explained James Dong, Lazada Group chief executive officer, at the LazMall Brands Future Forum (BFF) 2022 held last September 1 in Singapore.
“The behavior and mindset change during the past two years have driven more high-quality consumers who are looking for high-quality authentic products, and high-quality experiences, to come to LazMall. Brands now have the opportunity to build mindshare and connect with consumers using the tools from Lazada, to accelerate their growth in the eCommerce space and engage the right audience.”
Customer “stickiness” and retention were determined to be mostly attributable to Lazada’s extensive product catalog, low prices, streamlined checkout process, and broad range of customizable features.
Further, according to the LSS study, 94% of customers use the search tool to find items on Lazada, and 94% of those shoppers end up buying the products they discovered via search. Furthermore, 71% of buyers made purchases based on Lazada’s user-specific “Recommendations” function.
