The 11.11 Mega Sales event is one of the biggest opportunities for eCommerce businesses to boost their revenue.
With platforms like Shopee, Lazada, and TikTok Shop offering significant discounts, it’s a goldmine for brands looking to attract new customers and maximize profits.
However, balancing profits across multiple marketplace platforms during this time can be challenging.
Each platform has its own strategies, pricing models, and customer behavior that must be considered to optimize results. Shopee and Lazada, for example, may attract price-conscious shoppers, while TikTok Shop leans more into social commerce and influencer-driven sales. Understanding these differences is key to leveraging each platform to its fullest potential.
The challenge lies in managing these distinct platforms without sacrificing profitability. To succeed, you need a clear strategy that addresses pricing consistency, promotion alignment, and efficient inventory management.
This blog will guide you through the process of creating a balanced approach to ensure that your 11.11 Mega Sales are both lucrative and manageable.
Let’s dive right in!
5 Strategies to keep the profit balanced across marketplaces
If you’re getting decent profit from only one marketplace while others do not perform up to the mark, the efforts of operating on them might not be worth it.
But leaving those channels altogether might lead to missed opportunities, considering some marketplace-loyal customers will never discover you.
So, ideally, you should try to optimize your operations for all different marketplaces to be profitable. And it starts with understanding the nuances of those marketplaces.
1. Understanding the unique characteristics of each marketplace
Each marketplace in the 11.11 Mega Sales event has unique characteristics that directly influence how businesses can manage profitability. Understanding these nuances is crucial for selecting the right platform for your products.
Shopee is known for its aggressive marketing and frequent flash sales. It attracts price-sensitive consumers, so budget-friendly items. If you’re a brand that wants to move large volumes of affordable products, this platform might be the best for you to capitalize on a high influx of discount-seeking customers.
Lazada, on the other hand, targets a more premium audience. It offers robust logistics and extensive advertising options, which makes it ideal for selling higher-end items like electronics, home appliances, or branded fashion. Lazada’s premium positioning allows brands to focus on quality and customer experience, which can translate into higher profitability margins.
TikTok Shop is a rising player, blending social media and shopping into one. This platform is great for trendy, visual products like beauty items, apparel, or lifestyle goods. Partnering with influencers to sell these products can generate good engagement and sales.
Lastly, Tokopedia is a popular marketplace in Indonesia, where trust and community are key. Brands that focus on local promotions and relationship-building with consumers can succeed by listing products that resonate with the local market, such as homegrown brands or culturally relevant items.
So let’s say you have 100 products — not all of it is meant to be listed on each platform. With product analysis, you can identify the product and the platform on which there’s demand for it. This way, you’ll not be overspending on your marketplace listings and will generate more profits across marketplaces like Shopee, Lazada, TikTok Shop, and others.
2. Strategizing pricing and discounts
During the 11.11 Double-Digit Sales, different marketplaces attract varied consumer behaviors. Some platforms cater to buyers willing to pay a premium, while others draw a highly price-sensitive audience.
Therefore, your pricing strategy should reflect these insights, ensuring you're maximizing profitability across platforms.
Tailor pricing for each platform
Pricing needs to align with each platform's demographics. For example, on Shopee, where price-conscious consumers dominate, offering competitively low prices is key to driving volume. In contrast, Lazada’s user base will be more open to paying for quality, so brands can afford to maintain price points on premium products.
Dynamic Pricing
This strategy allows you to adjust prices in real-time based on demand fluctuations and competitor actions. If a competitor on Shopee is offering a 20% discount on a similar item, you can tweak your price slightly to maintain an edge. Leveraging AI-driven tools can make this process seamless and ensure you’re never overpriced or undercut on the 11.11 sale day.
Smart Discounting
Rather than slashing prices, smart discounting tactics like tiered discounts or buy-one-get-one-free deals can encourage higher spending. Offering “spend $50 and get 10% off” on Lazada or "buy one, get one 50% off" on TikTok Shop can not only boost sales volume but also increase average order values. This can be particularly effective when applied to product bundles or complementary items.
By using an eCommerce analytics platform, you can track and analyze sales data across platforms. This helps identify where customers are more price-sensitive and where they’re willing to pay more. Adjust your pricing accordingly, ensuring that discounts are reserved for price-sensitive platforms, while maintaining premium pricing where justified. This data-driven approach ensures that you increase both sales and profits.
3. Inventory management across marketplaces
Effective inventory management is key to balancing profitability across multiple marketplaces during the 11.11 Mega Sales. Misallocating stock to marketplaces can lead to missed sales or unsold inventory.
For example, if you distribute 100 SKUs of a product across four platforms (25 each), but one platform sells out quickly while the others barely move, you’ve lost the opportunity to maximize sales on the high-performing channel.
With accurate data analysis, you could have allocated more SKUs to the platform where demand was higher, ensuring profitable outcomes.
Here’s what you should do:
Stock Allocation: Use historical sales data to allocate stock accurately across platforms, preventing stock outs on high-demand channels and capitalizing on sales opportunities.
Platform-Specific Best Sellers: Focus on platform-specific best sellers to prioritize inventory where it’s likely to sell fast, enhancing profitability.
Avoiding Overselling: Real-time inventory tracking prevents overselling, which can lead to order cancellations, customer dissatisfaction, and loss of future sales, safeguarding your profits.
4. Leveraging platform-specific promotions
Leveraging platform-specific promotions is crucial for increasing profitability during major sales events like 11.11.
Exclusive platform deals
Running exclusive promotions or bundles tailored to each marketplace can significantly drive platform-specific traffic.
For instance, offering a bundle exclusively on Shopee will appeal to its price-sensitive audience, while Lazada could feature premium bundles with value-added services.
Additionally, focusing on Shopee’s peak sales hours from 8 pm to 2 am can contribute to as much as 60% of the total 11.11 campaign sales, showing the importance of aligning promotions with these high-traffic windows.
Similarly, brands selling on Lazada should note that their campaigns vary by region; Lazada PH starts on 8th November at 8 pm, while the rest of Lazada regions begin on 10th November at 8 pm.
Leveraging these time slots to run exclusive deals can create urgency, driving platform loyalty and increasing the potential for higher sales.
Cross-platform campaigns
Coordinating marketing efforts across multiple platforms ensures a seamless experience for customers engaging through various channels.
Research shows that 72% of consumers prefer interacting with brands through multiple channels. Ignoring this could result in missed opportunities.
For example, running a cross-platform campaign that promotes a product on Shopee, TikTok Shop, and Lazada can amplify your brand's reach while ensuring customers can easily shop from their preferred platform.
TikTok Shop engagement
With consumer spending on TikTok surpassing $2.5 billion globally, this platform is not to be overlooked.
TikTok’s emphasis on creative content, paired with influencer partnerships, offers a unique opportunity to engage audiences.
And considering that 45% of TikTok users shop based on influencer recommendations, brands should leverage influencers to create engaging content that resonates with TikTok’s vibrant community.
TikTok's 11.11 campaign starts on 7th November at 8 am and runs until 12th November. By promoting limited-time offers via TikTok influencers, brands can drive early engagement and sales, creating momentum that aligns with peak sales times on Shopee and Lazada.
5. Optimizing advertising spends across marketplaces
Optimizing your advertising spend across marketplaces is key to ensuring profitability during the 11.11 Mega Sales.
A careful allocation of your advertising budget is essential, as each platform offers distinct opportunities that can impact your ROI.
Start by analyzing past performance metrics to identify where your ads have historically driven the most sales or engagement. This data will help guide your budget allocation, ensuring you invest more in high-performing channels like Lazada, where higher-end products may yield better margins, or TikTok Shop, which is ideal for capturing social commerce-driven sales.
Performance marketing on platforms like these marketplace platforms can significantly enhance your brand’s visibility. However, it’s critical to tailor your ad creatives and targeting strategies to align with the unique dynamics of each marketplace.
For example, TikTok’s video format and influencer-driven nature require ads that resonate with a younger, content-driven audience, whereas Shopee’s flash sale environment might benefit from urgency-driven promotions.
Integrating cross-channel advertising through Meta Ads and Google Ads with your marketplace strategies can further amplify your reach. This integration allows for a more cohesive marketing approach, where customers are exposed to your brand across multiple platforms, increasing their likelihood of converting to one of the marketplaces.
By balancing advertising spend across these channels, you can also balance the profits.
Leveraging predictive analytics to get data-driven insights for decision-making
Balancing profits across multiple marketplaces ultimately depends on how effectively you allocate your resources—whether it’s inventory, marketing budgets, or even your time and attention.
During major sales events like 11.11, decisions based on real-time data are key to increasing profitability. This is where predictive analytics becomes invaluable.
With predictive analytics, you can streamline your efforts by eliminating platforms that show little to no demand, allowing you to focus on a smaller number of marketplaces that promise higher returns. This helps reduce complexity and ensures that your resources are directed where they’ll have the most impact.
Additionally, predictive analytics enables you to accurately forecast product demand, helping you allocate stock where it’s likely to sell the fastest. Instead of relying on guesswork, you can ensure that your best-sellers are stocked appropriately on each platform, minimizing stock outs or overstock.
On the marketing front, predictive insights help you set budget allocations that capture more sales at a lower cost. By identifying where your advertising spend will be most effective, you can drive greater ROI while keeping costs in check.
Graas’ advanced predictive analytics tools allow you to do all this and more, providing a comprehensive solution for balancing profits across marketplaces. Explore Graas today to know how it can help your business with data-driven insights to maximize your 11.11 sales. Sign Up for a 30 Day
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