The Singapore-based women’s fashion logo MDS Collections urgently needed a new sales channel when the pandemic closed all of its stores. Drum catches up with his co-founders to discover how social commerce was the solution.
“In the midst of Covid-19, we had to challenge ourselves and try new tactics to show ourselves and be informed about anything new,” says Joe Phua, co-founder of Singapore-based MDS Collections.
This “something new” turned out to be a collaboration with Taiwanese start-up Ikala, the AI-based visitor engagement platform that raised $17 million to expand in Southeast Asia.
“The Ikala team has been very attractive and supportive in terms of sharing concepts and data on the evolution of other markets and visitor behavior,” Phua says.
“It took us less than a week to double our online presence using social commerce, as it is a style that can be seamlessly replicated through our franchisees. And we conducted our first live sales consultation approximately one week before the Singapore circuit breaker. »
Working with Ikala has also given MDS a platform that addresses emerging and evolved markets in the region, as its shoplus social selling tool works on a large scale and is attentive to market development.
This has helped MDS know other attitudes toward social commerce, such as when other people prefer not to pay through credit cards or use them.
“Today’s companies are incredibly involved in being transparent with their consumers and the general public. Social commerce is a tool that naturally promotes real-time communication with customers. It also stimulates entertainment; I call this combining ‘commercial entertainment’.
“It is especially vital to offer consumers an attractive and fun delight at a tricky time like this, and social commerce is probably the closest thing to physical commerce.
“Our sales first fell by 80% at the beginning of the Covid-19 period, but with the immediate shift to social commerce, we managed to recover more than part of the decline in the same month. Combined with Facebook ads, the knowledge collected in each live query has been useful to us in many ways, such as expanding conversion and reducing costs.
“An intelligent example is the service as “purchase intent” in Shoplus, which helped us perceive the amount of stock of a safe product that we want to buy to meet the demand of visitors without exceeding us, which can be very expensive.
Sega Cheng is the CEO and co-founder of Ikala. Explains that while ad blockers and synthetic intelligence are driving a paradigm shift in virtual marketing, there is a genuine desire for new channels and content formats to attract consumers well while being part of their radar seamlessly.
He says that smart retail that is helping consumers sell their products more successfully on social media, combined with influential marketing, is incredibly found in Southeast Asia, where social commerce goes beyond the field of online grocery shopping.
“Customers are now online more than ever and many brands are reallocating their advertising budgets to performance-based marketing and exploring new channels of visitor engagement. As futuristic as it may seem, synthetic intelligence is now at the center of effective and successful marketing. Techniques
The retail sector has been experiencing an online replacement for some time, but the pandemic has given it a definitive impetus. The first to adopt virtual responses were more prepared for the sudden influx of consumers who began buying food online in this era compared to brands that followed virtual commerce at a much later stage.
“Physical retail will not be the same, at least in the near future,” Phua says. “Customers who haven’t purchased online are doing it now, and consumers who have already done so are in favor of new online grocery shopping reports like social media commerce.
“We temporarily leveraged the generation to rotate our sales channels, and now we’re focusing on replicating this style with our franchisees so they can enjoy the same results. We are also very noisy and other marketing specialists take advantage of the merits of platforms like iKala to drive their growth.
This article refers to: Singapore, COVID-19, e-commerce, advertising, virtual advertising, marketing, mobile, social networks, virtual, brand
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