Occupying the entire third floor of an A-class office building in district 10 in HCMC, the headquarters of Tiki is full. Tiki just moved to the new workplace earlier this year, but Tran Ngoc Thai Son, the founder and chair of Tiki, said Tiki may lease one more floor in the building.

The Vietnamese startup has been building more infrastructure items and gathering strength to improve the order completion centers.

“Newspapers write about Tiki’s big losses these days. So, you can see that the money has been spent on infrastructure, operating systems and storehouses,” Son said.

The company now owns more than 30,000 square meters of depot and plans to have 100,000 square meters in 6-8 months, with cooperation from Unidepot.

Tiki was the player which triggered the war on delivery time with the launch of ‘Tiki Now’ service. Fast delivery is the ‘trump card’ that the service provider uses to entice shoppers.

“’Faster and more’ is a part of our long-term business strategy,” Son said. Tiki has more than 100,000 products delivered within two hours. It also provides the services of delivering goods within three hours, within day and over day.

The ‘Tiki 2 hours’ service has prompted other deliverymen to join the race. Shopee commits to delivery goods within four hours, and Sendo 3 hours, while Lotte.vn offers the options of delivering goods within 1, 3, and 24 hours.

However, analysts say that Tiki’s list of fast-delivery goods is still the biggest among e-commerce websites, thanks to the ‘managed marketplace’ model, i.e goods all go to Tiki’s storehouse before delivery, which allows it to control the delivery time. This is why Tiki needs big money to build more depots.

Meanwhile, for other websites, the normal marketplace model allows sellers to take the initiative in delivering goods, so it is difficult to fix the time.

Meanwhile, Lazada, a veteran foreign marketplace, recently has been using showbiz celebrities to entice customers.

In late June Lazada changed its brand identification model with the image of a heart. Its managers said this is an important part of the strategy on deploying the shoppertainment model, or shopping in association with entertainment.

“We are capturing the region's 'beat' by observing the behavior, approach and the way consumers are using our shopping platform,” said Mary Zhou, marketing director of Lazada.

In late March, a festival was organized with superstar Dua Lipa. The event attracted 12 million viewers throughout Southeast Asia. The revenue Lazada received on March 27 was 15 times higher than usual.

Mai Chi

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