Lazada's CEO talks about the company's strategy in 2015 to media on Wednesday. — VNS Photo

E-commerce is growing in leaps and bounds in Viet Nam with the entry of many international players. Alexandre Dardy, CEO of Lazada Viet Nam, talks about the market and his company's strategies.

Why did Lazada choose Viet Nam to invest? What are the challenges you have encountered here?

At the start, Viet Nam's infrastructure and market were ready with a growing economy. Moreover, we have more than 40 per cent broadband penetration and more than 25 per cent Smart phone penetration, and most of it constitutes young, internet-savvy Vietnamese: this is the perfect raw material to build e-commerce from.

Setting up a new e-commerce business in a country that is relatively new to online shopping has both infrastructural as well as psychological challenges. However, we are step addressing by step these challenges to bring the greatest value to Vietnamese consumers

Building trust and educating customers who are new to online shopping continues to be our focus. We have overcome it by providing risk-free shopping with a broad range of secured payment options (including cash on delivery which is key to getting new customers on board) and 30-day return policy to bring greatest ease to consumers.

Establishing a delivery infrastructure is also important as we pride ourselves on providing the widest delivery reach across Viet Nam. We work closely with our transportation partners who had to change their mindsets on delivering under tight deadlines with cash on delivery agreements.

Attracting the right talent is also a challenge, as the e-commerce industry needs to demonstrate that it has perennial potential.

Do you believe that Lazada can soon become the market leader in e-commerce in the country?

We believe that at present we are at the forefront of Viet Nam's e-commerce industry. We are benefitting from a double-scale effect, which is support from Rocket Internet and our group's scale. Rocket Internet has brought us the IT platform: both internet user interface and Lazada IT systems have been developed by Rocket Internet.

Moreover, Lazada group scale enables sharing of best practices in every single dimension of e-commerce, it enables scale to get unique deals with regional brands: today Lazada strikes exclusive deals with international brands.

What are the objectives of Lazada in Viet Nam and what have you done to achieve them?

In Viet Nam, we want to win every customer's trust and become their reference "one-stop" shopping destination.

There are some key factors that helped us realise these objectives successfully within three years:

Quickly get a high-performance web/e-commerce platform.

Strong Focus on assortment: assortment has always been a priority for us; we now always focus on commercial teams on sellers on boarding and assortment development

Price is of the essence and we have enabled our team to benchmark on an ongoing basis both online and offline competitors and make sure Lazada would remain competitive against them

Ensure nation-wide delivery: from the very beginning, Lazada has built strong partnerships with nationwide carriers so that every single place in Vietnam is accessible to us

Payment method that would build trust: last but not least, we have enabled very early "cash on delivery". This creates trust among customers in a market where prepayment-related rip-offs have made customers a bit reluctant to pay before the product hits their doorstep

Being present on all platforms: besides our desktop website, consumers can access our shopping experience through multiple platforms including m-site, iOS, Android, and Windows phone apps.

Source: Lazada