Staying Relevant in E-Commerce

A presentation that i had done on the competitive landscape of e-commerce in South East Asia and how to remain relevant.

The slides are below with easy to understand 8 tips on how to stay on top of things

The purpose of this slide was to talk about how through economic instability and uncontrollable macro factors, there is still and always will be opportunity

The opportunity that I had seen was in the pet industry. It was largely untapped by e-commerce players and was an industry that had largely remained offline and had minimal digital presence. In other words, it was prime for disruption.

This lead to the birth of Petloft.com and the first tip of staying relevant, which is to observe the market and always be looking out of opportunities. Ask your self the 3 questions.

The second tip was how we expanded and grew our business into its second vertical. Once we had started selling, we looked at our customers, understood their daily journey and life cycle and that had led us to another opportunity. Venbi was our vertical that focused on selling baby products.

The third tip comes along with out third vertical. This came about from us wanting to grow faster than what we had been. One of the ways to do this is to acquire. Doing so will allow you to take out some competition, gain huge media and publicity, get a foot into the door with suppers which would normally take months, and increase valuation of your company extremely quickly if due diligence is done properly.

Tip number 4 focused on getting the right product mix for your customers and showing variety. The only way an e-commerce company can survive is by expanding its product range and offering their market and customer segmentation more of the products that they want and need.

Tip number 5 gets into branding. Which most e-commerce companies will focus on optimizing their online campaigns and issuing discounts & coupons to get sales, we focused on building a brand. This had a 2 fold effect. It helped us build a strong base of loyal customers with high retention rates without discounts and it helped bring offline customers online to purchase from us. Building a brand means you are investing now to create an asset that will continuously pay back over the coming years.

Once we had begun building a brand, we made sure that it was used though all our verticals and that led us to rebrand all of our verticals to Moxy to ensure consistency and one voice from the company to our customers.

While you are busy growing, don't forget to keep your eyes on your competitors and their movements. This is tip number 6 and it is quite important. Keep your eyes out for marketing campaigns, mergers, acquisitions, closures, hires, partnerships, etc. They will tell you a lot about what customers are feeling, what investors are thinking, and what the offline space is doing.

While some might not agree with this particular tip, I am a strong believer in not putting all your eggs in one basket which is why i like diversification. What we did at Moxy was open a new line of business that focused on selling all the products that we had acquired for consumers to businesses in bulk. This ensured a consistent and long term revenue source, it allowed us to leverage the larger volumes from B2B to get a lower purchase price thus earning us more margins, and it gave us a mechanism to control growth so that there were no spikes in or dips.

Last but not least, one of the most important tips is ensuring that you are hiring people who are talented and can take your company to a new level. My personal perspective on this is that you should hire someone for a role only if they are much better than you at it and you can learn from them.