E-Fulfilment Strategies for Marketplaces: How ZALORA Boosts Efficiency and Customer Satisfaction
Headquartered in Singapore and Malaysia and owned by Global Fashion Group (GFG), Zalora is an exceptional example of booming Southeast Asian e-commerce brand taking the region by storm. With a net revenue of over €1,359.7 billion for financial year 2020 - ZALORA has gone from strength to strength, capturing the attention of Gen Z and Millenials with GREAT success!
Matej Urban, Associate Regional Director, ZALORA Group joined the group in 2015, looking after B2B fulfillment services, consolidation of operations in Malaysia and the build up of their platform services in the region - essentially the full cycle of customer experience and customer journey on their platform.
“I think at this time, customers are looking increasingly for speed and visibility in terms of the delivery and interaction with the different marketplaces and channels where they purchase.”
- Matej Urban, Associate Regional Director, ZALORA Group
In this exclusive interview during eTail Asia this June, Matej told us why it’s critical for brands to provide an exceptional experience and that providing accurate and timely information, coupled with the perfect level of service over multiple channels is crucial if you want to succeed in today’s hyper competitive retail ecommerce landscape. We discuss why ZALORA manages to maintain brand perception and loyalty through their e-fulfilment hub which allows brands to strengthen their online presence and ensure a smooth customer journey from purchase to delivery.
- How to overcome supply chain issues and what retailers face today
- Why ZALORA focus on data analytics & marketplace data
- Trend reports in Asia today - how ZALORA uses trend data to inform their decision-making, sales and strategy
- How more than 45% of brand partners are leveraging ZALORA’s fulfillment centres
- Content localisation and cross border set up
Matej talks to us about the challenges when having 65 million customers across the region, why they’ve added an additional 2 million items in terms of capacity to store 6.5 million unique SKUs in their warehouses and the success behind their multi channel, multi platform approach.
Can you share some common challenges in logistics and supply chain, and how has Zalora done well in addressing them? What do you foresee in the future?
Firstly, we need to understand that in order to be successful in multi-channel ecommerce strategy, we want to provide a seamless customer experience. Secondly, in order for you to be competitive and efficient cost and operation-wise, we want to achieve assortment availability and operate in a cross-border set-up where we can fulfil across multiple markets and channels concurrently. This presents many challenges in the supply chain, especially in Southeast Asia where there’s 650 million customers across the region. It may seem like a homogenous region, but it is fragmented in terms of the different countries, and we need to provide a localised experience in the different markets where we operate.
Cross-borders set-ups presents challenges such as hyper-localisation where we need to understand the local’s customs requirements, create localised content, engaging with customers on the local level with end-to-end customer journey, from catalogue to checkout to delivery. We aim to work with brands and provide them with services and opportunities to scale and tackle to reach the customers in these various markets. We have been operating in the region for the past 10 years, and we’ve invested heavily in our infrastructure from both the fulfilment centres perspective and logistics set-ups.
We operate with a multitude of carriers and delivery partners, where speed and market access are always optimised so more customers in remote areas and islands can be reached. We’ve expanded these opportunities for our brands, requiring us to expand our warehouse recently for us to store 6.5 million SKUs. In 2020, we started one-stop solution, and it has garnered traction with our big strategic brand partners. Today, we have more than 30 clients leveraging on multi-channel fulfilment services, and we can service their webstores and other marketplaces to provide customers with the best experience, unlocking the limitless fashion in the region.
It is important for brands to provide a seamless customer experience to remain competitive in a multi-platform strategy. It is important to play towards your assortment and cost efficiency where we see the importance of cross-border fulfilment, where they can sell to different markets through several channels.
Zalora has invested heavily in our supply chain capabilities, and we see that as one of our core strengths. We’re looking to expand this to our brand partners for them to tap into these capabilities and approach customers more effectively.
How does Zalora keep its brand message and branding effective for all channels?
We have invested heavily in our marketplace operations and platform services. Today, our team of global specialists is focused on providing the best customer experience and at the same time, work closely with our brand customers to enable them to operate effectively.
For customers, we provide personalised access to brands and shoppable looks, all driven by our proprietary data analytics and machine learning.
For brands, they can tap in our fulfilment and production capabilities and strengths, production and content creation, all built on top of our marketplace platform. This allows them to scale more effectively across the region.
For Zalora, this combination of customers and centricity with the right level of support and empowerment from our brands creates a positive flywheel and impact for driving more sales volume on both our platform and the brands,’ providing customers with the best experience.