Earlier this month, Shopee launched Shopee for Men in the Philippines, an in-app store offering male-oriented products in various categories, ranging from Electronics and Sports to Fashion and Personal Care.
Similar to the strategy adopted for the main platform, Shopee for Men offers big discounts to attract the male audience. By leveraging its partnership with brands for ShopeeMall, the platform curates the selected products of numerous leading brands favored by the male population such as Asus, Xiaomi, Bosch, and Spalding. The platform also offered limited sales of the newly released iPhone XS during its promotional period.
Why did Shopee launch its Men platform in the Philippines?
The Philippines is the third market where Shopee launched its dedicated platform for Men, after the previous launch in Indonesia and Thailand, and it’s not without reason.
The country has a slightly higher male population (53.8 million) than female (52.8 million), and the Filipino male population is forecast to rise over the years steadily. Moreover, most of the Philippines’ population belong the younger generations of millennials and gen-Z. These generations are more likely to be digital-savvy, have higher purchasing power, and more willingness to spend money. In short, the driver of ecommerce growth in the Philippines.
A report from Paypal and Ipsos already forecasts the country’s online spending to increase by 32% in 2018 to $2.2 billion (PHP 121. 9 billion) from $1.7 billion (PHP 92.5 billion) in 2017.
However, online shoppers in the Philippines are still predominantly female, presenting a mostly untapped male audience with stronger purchase power, as found in our latest e-marketplace survey.
What do Filipino male consumers usually buy online?
OLX Data Hub found that Filipino male consumers like to shop online for items in categories like furniture, sports, health items, and surprisingly baby-related goods. Millennial men primarily are the driver of this growth.
Shopee’s Head of Commercial Business Macy Castillo confirms this finding as they discovered men aged 25-30 years old mainly buy wellness, hobbies, and sporting goods. However, they also found that the top purchases among age groups differ.
The 20-24-year-olds group tends to buy more fashion items. This group also shops online more often than other age groups, despite their lower purchasing power since they’re either university students or first-time job seekers.
Meanwhile, skincare and baby & children products are more popular among the 31-35-year-olds group, of whom are more likely to have a family and already in the working force, giving them a higher purchasing ability to buy items that are more costly like wellness and children goods.
What’s the most popular online platform for Filipino men?
Generally speaking, Lazada is the most popular B2C e-marketplace preferred by most Filipinos, followed by Shopee and Zalora in the second and third rank, respectively.
Women make up for the majority of online shoppers in the Philippines, and it can be seen in these sites’ demographic as well. As such, there are more products available on the site for women than men online.
For example, a simple search of “men” in Lazada will give you around 4 million items whereas “women” will display almost triple the number (11.8 million) — showing the disparity in the number of goods available for different genders. A similar search on Shopee will also show the same result, depicting high opportunity for ecommerce companies to appeal to the Filipino male consumers.
According to the same Paypal report, the top two reasons to shop online for Filipino consumers are convenience (82%) and the availability of multiple platforms (52%). By presenting male consumers the same convenience to compare hundreds of similar items within minutes and providing more products for them, we can expect to see a rising influx of Filipino male consumers on these platforms in the coming years.
How can ecommerce websites attract more male shoppers?
Having a website or a dedicated landing page solely for male shoppers is a step in the right direction as it allows them to save time from having to comb through products mainly positioned for females and lets them start shopping immediately.
Although in general men and women shoppers value the same characteristics from online shopping platforms, our survey found the subtle differences that e-marketplaces can use to take advantage of in attracting the male segment.
One of the most important values for male shoppers is site reputation, as they’re less likely to browse through multiple sites everytime they’re doing their shopping. By offering an overall good shopping experience and providing additional values such as same-day delivery, a better mobile app, and easy return policy, e-marketplace have higher chance to convert them to be loyal shoppers.
Compared to women, men tend to shop less frequently online. But many of them are more willing to shop in full price retailers and spend more money per purchase, illustrating how men might not be as price-sensitive as female consumers.
Online platforms like Shopee need to offer more than just low price to get more men to want to shop online.
It’s early days for the male online shoppers in the Philippines, and the verdict isn’t out yet, but if the data says anything, there’s no doubting the potential of this segment. And if Shopee’s attempt proves to gain enough traction, we can expect more male-oriented online platforms in Southeast Asia in the future.
The post Shopee for Men: Tapping the Potential of Online Male Shoppers in the Philippines appeared first on ecommerceIQ - Ecommerce in Southeast Asia, Reports, Data, Insights.
