South East Asia’s “Cyber Monday” pushes ecommerce sales

Three leading online companies celebrated four week online revolution: sales increased up to 40%

December 2013 – South East Asia’s e-commerce ventures Lazada, ZALORA and foodpanda started a four week online sales campaign based on the notorious American “Cyber Monday”. Like its counterpart in the US, the online revolution also tries to break sales records in Asia. Costumers in Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia have been offered a round of deals, offers and discounts that started on November 11th.

Ralf Wenzel, Global Managing Director of food delivery service foodpanda: “Bringing the concept of Cyber Monday to South East Asia was a huge success. We experienced a massive 20 - 30% increase in traffic in all countries. In Malaysia we had a 40% new customer increase, and in Vietnam a 40% revenue increase. Cyber Monday and similar events help to educate the market and further underline the mega trend of online shopping.”

Furthermore, in Singapore foodpanda had a jump of 25% in traffic weekly and an increase of 20% in orders on the final day. foodpanda Thailand and Indonesia also had an exceptional finale with traffic tripling in Thailand and increasing five times in Indonesia, compared to a normal Thursday.

Igor Pezzilli, CEO of Lazada Malaysia: “We are more than happy with the so far received results of the Online Revolution. Regarding sales and site traffic we could see a record breaking response since the start of the campaign.”

The “Cyber Monday” was set out to revolutionize the way of shopping and change the way people think about shopping. It was invented in the US as a made-up occasion to give underdog e-commerce sites jealous of regular-shopping spectacle “Black Friday” a day of their own, but it has become an undeniably real thing: A shopping day invented for the web.

Food delivery platform foodpanda could also discover an extraordinary increase in mobile orders - another trend, says Ralf Wenzel: “Over the last months we have experienced a great increase of customers using our service through our mobile application. During The Online Revolution mobile orders increased over 20% in all countries in South East Asia together”

The success of the Online Revolution and the broad participation of Southeast Asian customers also reflects the rapid growth and acceptance of e-commerce in the region.