By Vincent Mariel P. Galang
Reporter
ONLINE SHOPPING is as easy as 1, 2, 3, but ever wonder how your order gets processed after checking out? Lazada Philippines shared how it fulfills your orders after placing it to delivery at your doorstep.
Orders being processed in a Lazada warehouse, like the one in Cabuyao, Laguna, are tagged “fulfilled by Lazada.” They have readily available supply in the warehouse and are processed by the company itself. After a shopper finishes the checking-out step, the order is verified to confirm the buyer’s authenticity. Once verified, the order is passed on for picking, packing, and preparation for shipping. All these steps can happen in as fast as 20 minutes.
The logistics arm of the e-commerce company always sees to it to “fulfill” every order it receives. This process goes on 24/7 in order to take on tens and thousands of orders made through the platform, but just like any other company, it sees to it to have room for improvement to better serve its shoppers.
“There are always things for us to improve. I think the thing to remember is that no one else has done this before here and so we’re constantly innovating and trying to find new ways to improve our accuracy, our speed, our presentation, but also what we’re focusing on is trying to get the best possible service. That’s what we’re here to do,” Joe Davies, senior vice-president for fulfillment of Lazada Philippines, told reporters during a warehouse tour in a property in Cabuyao, Laguna on March 28 after the company’s birthday sale held on March 27.
He noted the layout of the warehouse that changes from time to time. Instead of painting the lines on the floor, tapes are used to easily adjust the layout when the need to do so arises.
“We’ve been open here for about 18 months,” Mr. Davies said about the Cabuyao warehouse. “We don’t paint lines on the floor because we used to have lines and we keep changing everything. So we’re constantly changing what we do, we change the layout. We tweak it a little bit here and a little bit there that’s why we don’t use paint. Next month we might do something different, something new.”
“We have a culture here where we try new things all the time. We’re not afraid to try things. Somethings work really well, some don’t work well maybe we won’t do them anymore, we’ll do something else. We’re constantly looking for new ways to work,” he said.
The company’s warehouse in Cabuyao opened its second phase in late 2018. It now has a total area of 54,000 square meters for both warehouses. Phase one accommodates fast-moving products, or the smaller orders, while phase two handles the bulky items, like appliances, or bulk orders. The property is considered to be its biggest warehouse.
On what’s next for the company’s logistics, Mr. Davies said the company is trying to look for more areas where it can reach more customers.
“We’ll probably look at different areas to distribute the volume around. We look to strategically place the fulfillment centers as close as we can to where the customers are. This is ideal because we’re very close to SLEx [South Luzon Expressway] and we’re very close to getting items to Manila,” he said, referring to the location of the Laguna warehouse.
Lazada’s other warehouses in the Philippines are in Cebu and Davao, which allows it to reach customers in southern Philippines. “The reason we have Davao and Cebu is to put items closer to our customers. We locate them transport them to Cebu and Davao and we distribute them,” he said. All of the company’s warehouses operate 24/7.
WRAPPING UP THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
On March 27, Lazada held its birthday sale that had posted sales 15 times more than a normal day. Throughout the company’s week-long celebration, it attracted 318 million visits. The event also marked the success of its “shoppertainment” concept through the first ever livestreamed “Super Party” concert, which had 12 million views in both the app and on television. The concert, with 5,000 people participating, was held in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Lazgame, which had another upgrade to the shopping experience it offers, attracted 2.5 million people to acquire deals. Shoppers on average visited the app six times a day to play with nine of 10 customers having collected cupcakes for shopping vouchers.
For Lazada Philippines, visits were twice more than a usual day, with more than five million transactions during the peak hour. The top five brands that made it to the brand leaderboard were Maybelline, Xiaomi, Coocaa, Promil, and Pampers.
“It has been a wonderful seven years for Lazada and we are thankful for the chance to serve our shoppers, sellers, and brands. Our goal has always been to develop an eCommerce ecosystem that now includes live streaming, games and will continuously nurture the growth of brands and sellers in the region,” Lazada Philippines Chief Executive Officer Ray Alimurung said in a statement on March 30.
