Selling 50,000 more table lamps in 6 months may sound impossible. However, Life WareHouse, a lifestyle e-Commerce merchant has made it.
Currently, Life WareHouse has more than 150,000 members, plus a 20% retention rate. With these great successes, an emerging thought of developing cross-border commerce has grown inside the team. In the Summer of 2018, Life WareHouse has expanded its business into Malaysia, a country where online shopping is popular and online advertising is still efficient. Within a year, Life WareHouse in Malaysia has reached 80% of membership increase and 50% of sales growth.
3 Tips to Grow Sales and Increase Membership Base
“This business started as an accident. Initially, we were just sharing news and designer products on the internet.” Said James Tseng, CEO of Life WareHouse, has majored in Industrial Design. In the beginning, James was just sharing products that interested him on his social media account, but later, as his viewers grow and people seemed to be interested in buying the products he shared, he thought to himself that maybe he could import those products and sell them online.
Life Warehouse started its business on major marketplace platforms and would use facebook and Google sheet to take orders. Now, Life Warehouse has its own branded website with hundreds of products, and the company still follows one principle when choosing products that are “fairly priced and well designed.” By following this role, they not only created product differentiation from other sellers but also able to constantly provide products that are precisely targeted to its audience.
The second tip of the company’s success is to engage with customers. Right from the beginning, Life Warehouse knew that social media would be an important channel for them to reach, engage, and market products to customers. Through Facebook posts, it’s able to reach its target audience and send out marketing messages to attract new customers and retain existing customers. Now, it has more than 400K followers on social media, and the company is working towards getting 600K followers.
Lastly, an ideal online web builder platform is the best companion for the growth of Life Warehouse, and to ensure its stable service quality. Currently, Life Warehouse is operating its online shop with SHOPLINE for both its location: Taiwan and Malaysia. Through SHOPLINE’s Integrated payment gateways and logistics services, it has improved the business’ operation efficiency, and shoppers can pay with their desired method and get fast shipping.
SHOPLINE’s Web-Builder Solution to Improve Brand Operational Efficiency
James recalled at the beginning of launching Life Warehouse, the company did not have its own website, and it was taking orders from facebook and google sheet, which requires a lot of labor and manual work to take care of packaging, shipping, and bookkeeping.
Back then, it’s daily sales amount has risen over 230,000 NTD, along with packaging, and shipping can be laborious, not to mention other manual work. After this strenuous event, James decides to find an efficient cure that can save employees’ time on dealing with payment and shipping. “Time shouldn’t be spent on work like these, the company needs to be more structured and automated to grow.” Said James.
His research on finding the cure lead him to SHOPLINE, the intuitive interface of SHOPLINE’s web-builder panel has allowed the team to operate the system effortlessly. It can also integrate with Google Analytics to monitor the website traffic; install facebook pixel to operate Facebook Ads easily. The features offered by SHOPLINE helped Life Warehouse to build a powerful platform and SHOPLINE’s consultants were able to provide business recommendations and the supports it needs.
The obstacle of Cross-Border Commerce: How to Overcome Cultural Difference and Launch a Localized Service
“During the time of our expansion into the Malaysia market, SHOPLINE was supportive and helped a lot,” James mentioned. When first working with SHOPLINE, we had a lot of system requests, and SHOPLINE was prompt to answer and provide guidance especially with website localization. SHOPLINE has partnered with banks in Malaysia to offer 3rd party payment methods like MOLPAY, to give Malaysian a convenient and localized way to shop with Life Warehouse.
Besides the website localization, James also shared many obstacles the company encountered when entering a new market. For example, shopping preferences, cultural background, and race between Malaysia and Taiwan are different which needs to be addressed proactively. To better solve these problems, Life Warehouse also formed a team in Malaysia, with team members on the ground to provide localized services to Malaysians. Also, with corporating with SHOPLINE’s consultants, the company is able to receive local marketing and business strategy insights to strengthen its business locally. And maybe in the near future, Life Warehouse will expand into Indonesia or many other countries, together, with SHOPLINE.
Marketing Associate at SHOPLINE. A digital marketing nerd and a podcast fan. You can find her out in the woods once in a while but most of the times she’s glued to her laptop screen indoors.