Same-day delivery
Lazada just rolled out its High-speed Delivery service in early April, which promises same-day delivery in Klang Valley, of over 4,000 items ordered before 1pm, for a flat fee of RM15. Lazada calls this a “promotional price”, suggesting that the price may go up if there is a huge demand for this service. Also, though it says the RM15 fee is for each item, if you were to purchase several eligible items at the same time, you’ll only be charged RM15 once.
For orders placed before 1pm, Lazada promises that it will be delivered in less than six (6) hours, between 3pm to 9pm, Mondays to Saturdays. Six hours after 1pm is 7pm, but the 7–9pm window is probably to make up for unforeseen delays that may surface along the way. Depending on what time you view the eligible products, the option will either be called “1-Day Delivery” or “Express Delivery”. Of course, there might be some spots in Klang Valley that don’t have this service, so as always, enter the postcode of your current location on the upper-right of the product page to check. Even if you were to select the ‘Express Shipping’ option after 1pm, you’ll still receive the product the very next day as early as 9am, but for the same RM15 fee.
Apparently, Lazada has been testing this express delivery service for a few weeks already. With the announcement on April 7th, it is now ready and confident it’ll be able to deliver on what it has promised. One of the main reasons for this is that Lazada had just opened its latest fulfilment center in Subang Jaya itself, that is 16 times larger than the company’s existing warehouses, and claims to be the largest facility of any e-commerce player in Southeast Asia. With a fulfilment center this large, Lazada’s able to stock up on the products, and couple that with Lazada’s upgraded order management systems, it is ready to ship out the items just hours after the orders are made. This also means that all 4,035 items currently available for Lazada’s same-day delivery service, are “sold and fulfilled by Lazada” as stated on the right side of the product page; a nice side effect of the service as it’ll ensure that the product you buy not only gets delivered fast, but delivered by a trusted seller and not by some third-party vendor.
Lazada said that is planning and working to expand High-speed Delivery to other parts of Malaysia, but no specific time frame was given. The company also said it is actively exploring more items to be included in its same-day delivery service, items that include time-critical products like groceries, as long as it has the logistics to ship these items out fast.
All Lazada High-speed Delivery items are available here. The FAQ about shipping options here.
Contest for new service
Lazada Malaysia is also running a contest to promote its same-day delivery service, that runs from April 11th until the 24th, 2016. Called the ‘High-speed Delivery Snap & Win’ contest, you’ll simply need to purchase a product using the “1-Day Delivery” or “Express Delivery” option. Lazada will ship 30 “Golden Truck” cards out each day, and if you’re one of the lucky ones to receive it, snap a photo of your purchased product together with the card, and post the photo as a comment on the Lazada Malaysia’s Facebook post that announced this very contest, which is found here. The fastest entry will win a RM250 voucher.
Investment by Alibaba
Meanwhile, on April 12th (the same-day delivery announcement was sent out on the 7th), both Alibaba Group Holding Limited and Lazada Group S.A. also announced that they’ve entered an agreement for Alibaba to acquire a controlling stake in Lazada, a Rocket Internet-backed company. The deal consists of Alibaba investing approximately US$500 million (~RM1.9 billion) in fresh capital of Lazada. This coupled with acquisition of another US$500 in stock from existing Lazada shareholders, make up to a total investment of approximately US$1 billion (~RM3.9 billion).
Rocket Internet itself sold 9.1% stake for US$137 million, with an 8.6% stake sold by Tesco for US$129 million, and a 3.8% stake for US$57 million sold by Kinnevik. Other companies who followed suit to sell their stakes did not reveal any figures.
Founded not that long ago in 2012, Lazada is currently operating in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. The total population of these six countries combined to approximately 560 million people. According to Internet Live Stats, out of that number, a good 200 million of folks in these region are internet users. However, only three percent (3%) of the region’s total retail sales are conducted online. With this deal, Alibaba expects to get brands, distributors, and vendors around the world who are already doing business with Alibaba, to access the vastly-untapped Southeast Asian market.
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