China’s Alibaba Group owned Shop.com.mm, an online shopping platform in Myanmar grew rapidly in Myanmar

Shop.com.mm, the online shopping operations in Myanmar owned by China’s Alibaba Group, is growing rapidly, company officials said. 

Frans Maas, managing director of Shop.com.mm, told The Myanmar Times the site is expanding at a rate of 10 times year-on-year.

Shop.com.mm, an online shopping platform in Myanmar, provides online shopping across a variety of products to customers across Myanmar. It says it is empowering thousands of sellers to connect with millions of customers and provides immediate and easy access to 500,000 products in more than 100 categories. 

Alibaba acquired Shop in 2018, and soon began introducing new technologies to offer better user experiences with features such as a personalised product feeds, instant messaging between sellers and customers, flash sales, games, in-app customer service, collections, and seller recommendations. 

“We’ve really tried to provide customers with what they want. Throughout the last year, we’ve increased the online products from 50.000 unique products to now almost 500,000 products. Besides that, we run weekly campaigns for specific sellers, products or categories,” Maas told The Myanmar Times.

He added that “we protect our customers 100 percent against any kind of problems they could face while shopping online. We provide our customers with free returns in which they can return their product for free and get their money back, and we store their data safely with world-class Alibaba technology.”

He said new technologies such as customer application, seller application, and logistic systems over the past year have helped improve customer and seller experience.

But while the firm’s expanded employee base, from 80 to 300, as well as its new logistics infrastructure has helped it with deliveries, sending small parcels to customer’s houses remains a challenge in Myanmar because a central address database does not really exist in many parts of the country, or because street names on maps are different from the street names that people actually use, Maas said.

He said that the company will continue building further the e-commerce ecosystem in Myanmar, besides continue focusing on customers, technology, and logistics. 

“Building an e-commerce marketplace like Shop involves a lot of actors, for example, payment partners, logistic partners, telco partners, and most importantly sellers and customers. We focus on working together with each of those groups to, step-by-step, grow the e-commerce ecosystem, and move part of their business online. Worldwide it is a trend that more and more businesses move online, and that goes as well for all of our partners. We are an enabler in that ecosystem to move more business, payments and deals online,” Maas said. 

Shop will hold an "11.11 campaign" on November 11 in Myanmar, said to be one of the biggest campaigns of the year. Created by Alibaba, 11.11, or Singles day, is the world’s biggest online sale every year. The event is an essential part of Alibaba’s growth strategy, with the goal being that this single day is the best day so far on the platform, crushing previous records, the most sellers participating, the best discounts, and most customers participating, Mass said. 

(The Myanmar Times: https://www.mmtimes.com/news/shopcommm-grows-rapidly-myanmar.html )

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