In this followup piece from a two-part feature, we explore how the global pandemic has impacted the way products are showcased and brands engage consumers as well as opened up new doors for some online players.
The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the need to change the way consumers interact with products and brands. Some businesses have adopted technologies such as augmented reality to reduce the dependency on physical sites, and others are tweaking their products to help ease the transition into a post-pandemic environment. This followup piece of a two-part feature explores how the current crisis has impacted the way products are showcased and opened new doors for some online players, while the first article looks at how traditional companies are coping with the fallout from the pandemic. Consumer expectation had amplified and changed tremendously, and businesses must evolve alongside their customers, said Jason Gregory, managing director for FastKey at Singapore-based online property listing platform, PropertyGuru. He called on the property sector, in particular, to transform, noting that many professionals in the industry, up until just three months ago, would refuse to use anything related to digital. Faced with challenges brought about by COVID-19, property agents who previously depended on face-to-face meetings and lugged around physical brochures, now were turning to Zoom and trying to stand out by adopting these digital tools, Gregory told ZDNet. The pandemic also drove more consumers to shop online, including shoppers from the silver generation, said EZBuy CEO Wendy Liu. Founded in 2010, the online marketplace has 4 million registered users across four Asian markets including Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. It also launched its e-commerce platform in Taiwan and Hong Kong last year, and peddles «millions of products» from China, Taiwan, Korea, and the US. When asked, Liu said she was unable to share the site’s transaction figures because it was a US-listed company, but revealed that volume grew by 50% between March and June across the six Asian markets in which it operated. Markets such as Singapore and Thailand also clocked higher growth rates. In addition, the average basket size across the region clocked at SG$60. She noted that e-commerce adoption, while growing fast, previously was comparatively low in most Southeast Asian markets. This now had accelerated significantly thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, pushing more traditional sellers to digitalise and begin working with e-commerce players to drive sale, she said. The growth momentum helped expand EZBuy’s supplier network by some 20% as more sellers hopped on its marketplace, offering more variety in the products that now were available to consumers, she noted. «A lot of factories in China and Singapore, which in the past focused primarily on exports and had no intention to go on e-commerce platforms, started talking to us,» Liu said, adding that her merchant team in China visited several factories that produced premium products. «This pandemic has disrupted the industry and opened [the] mindset of [these suppliers] to work with us, as they can now see us as [a channel to] amplify their sales.» She also expressed optimism that suppliers that typically worked only with shopping malls and major retailers now would consider collaborating with platforms such as EZBuy, giving online players the opportunity to approach them and further expand their product offerings. Retailers also would need tools to help them better manage their supply chain, noted George Pepes, Zebra Technologies’ Asia-Pacific vertical solutions lead for healthcare and retail. At the start of the pandemic, regardless of whether they were bricks or online players, some retail businesses struggled to cope with the operational strain from the sudden surge in online demand and faced problems with inventory, Pepes said in a phone interview. He added that these companies had just come off from having to handle robust demand from the year-end holidays, only to go head-on into another large demand uptick due to the pandemic in the first quarter.
