What is the Dollar Value of Your Follower?

Find out how much store followers are really worth. BRANDIQ reveals the dollar value of brands’ fanbase in top marketplaces, which one you should invest, and why.

By signing up followers, Marketplace such as Lazada & Shopee allows a store owner to communicate with fans through the newsfeed. One should capitalize on engagement with followers and convert them to long-term customers.

Marketplace analytic is rather circumvented. Data scientist often finds themselves scarce of a necessary piece of the puzzle to analyze or build competitive analysis due to limited access to third party data. BrandIQ always advises our customers against using traditional Ecommerce metrics and practices whereby you will find an analytic journey full of missing bits and pieces.

In the previous issue, we reveal how big retailers are exploiting product category listings to boost the number of followers. This issue, we will figure out the underlying value of each and individual store subscribers.

Benchmarking follower’s performance against every competitor including greymarket seller on BrandIQ

Some might take an unorthodox approach and buy followers. It’s the fastest way towards building a fanbase. However, to assure that purchased followers will always be active to browse and buy (low churn rate), it’s advisable to only recruit followers from a site with a solid background and good reviews.

BrandIQ is the first Ecommerce Analytics Platform to launch in Southeast Asia. The platform covers data collection from top regional marketplaces, spread over 6 countries.

Sample Size

More than trillion bytes of Marketplace data are commuting day in day out ubiquitously. One of the common, and in this case – impractical, approaches often starts with taking a shot to try to interpret a galaxy of dataset all at once. On the other hand, Marketplace consists of a multitude number of products offered by blended seller’s quality, attempting to galvanize too many variables on the left-hand side of the equation could sometimes derive to unpleasant and skew results.

In this analysis, we choose four large-fanbase anonymous brands to each represents Health & Beauty, Electronics, Mom & Baby, and Fashion categories on two Southeast Asia’s marketplace leaders as our research subjects. This perspective enables us to compare two angles between marketplaces and categories. The findings are demonstrated in the following infographics.

It’s worth noting that each marketplace has its own characteristics and we did not anticipate customer/follower behaviors to be identical or comparable. Before proceeding to action, we suggest readers read the findings with caution.

Dollar value is key to understand market opportunity.

Regarding follower acquisitions, Marketplace B has dominated Mom & Baby, Fashion, also slightly edging on Health & Beauty categories whilst Marketplace A wins on Electronics.

Brand representatives’ gross dollar (total merchandise value) is overshadowed by Marketplace A for $46m to $18m. Merchandise value of Electronics products outshines other categories, yielding bigger basket size despite carefully selected comparable brands (in terms of size, wealth, company status).

However, when we look closely at the store follower dollar value, Electronics come second to Mom & Baby due to a significantly higher number of followers (store dollar value is the division between category gross value and number of followers). It could be interpreted as either most of Electronics followers have not yet converted to customer or Electronics followers are low quality and will not become spender.

Mom & Baby society is by far the finest of all. They produced substantial dollar value by just shy of a moderate number of followers. This group is the prime example of the real world’s simulation where mothers are inevitable top spenders above other demographics regardless of household income.

Fashion’s performance in marketplace B is terrifying. It translates blood-red ocean market where the follower’s dollar is descending to the floor and return on investment could be very limited.

The heavyweight Health & Beauty fight could not come to a unanimous winner, but if we have the last 10 dollars in our pocket, it’s a no brainer to put the money on marketplace A because of follower dollar value.

All in all, we are in the opinion that balancing between marketplace follower and brand.com (first-party platform) acquisition is critical to success in 2020 Ecommerce. We would highly recommend everyone to take into account the bigger picture of the business. And should you need further assistance, BRANDIQ professionals are always ready to support you.

Need assistance on locating market opportunity, gaining more insight on where you rank against your competitors?

Reach out to info@brandiq.asia to know how you can improve your ecommerce presence.