In our Lazada vs Shopee piece, we have conducted in-depth research and put together an unbiased and unbiased comparison of the two largest marketplaces in Southeast Asia (Lazada and Shopee) to help you logically assess which platform best suits your business needs.
History of Lazada
Maximilian Bittner founded Lazada in 2012 together with Rocket Internet (a Lazada backer). From 2012 to 2013, they raised funds with the help of prominent investors, JP Morgan being one of them.
In 2014, it was able to launch its first market in Singapore. In the end, this proved to be a great move but during the early phases of the project, they were at a huge disadvantage.
Today, people still prefer to shop from brick and mortar stores. Also not enough people have debit or credit cards. As a result, they have a hard time competing with companies like Amazon and Alibaba.
2016 was a turning point for database Lazada. At that time, Alibaba decided to acquire a controlling stake. The latter also supports them financially. And above all, Lazada is allowed to utilize Alibaba’s IP Protection platform.
Today, Lazada has 155,000 sellers and 3,000 brands selling to a consumer base across the region. It has 300 million SKUs available on its platform and is considered the market leader in terms of wide product variety.
History of Shopee
Forrest Xiaodong Li first founded Shopee in 2015 under the SEA company. It started as a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplace. Eventually, it may shift to a business-to-consumer (B2C) hybrid model. Since then, it has expanded to Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Shopee thrived in 2019. On September 23 of the same year, Shopee officially opened its six-story regional headquarters China Phone Numbers in Singapore Science Park. It is 244,000 square feet and six times larger than their previous office.
This building was previously used by WeWork. Shopee arranged the necessary negotiations to become the new tenant of the building to accommodate their expansion which will make room for around 3,000 employees. This expansion is also pushing the company further into the digital economy.
Shopped also pioneered the use of escrow payments within the marketplace to provide more security for both buyers and sellers.
