ShopBack, the leading online Cashback platform in Southeast Asia, observes a stronger head start in 2018 for Malaysia as compared to Singapore.
“Further to our positive performance in the Q4 2017, almost 20% more digital transactions went through ShopBack Malaysia compared to our Singapore counterpart last month. Looking at our January 2018 vs January 2017 data, ShopBack Malaysia has experienced more than twice the growth. Data shows that when it comes to savings, Malaysians are more aggressive and increasingly choose ShopBack as a convenient way to accumulate Cashback for every transaction,” said Alvin Gill, Country General Manager of ShopBack Malaysia.
“Several factors such as the petrol price hike and subsequent increase in food cost has urged Malaysians to optimise their spending in every possible way, to which we are glad to be able to help more than 850K Malaysians in getting over RM25 million Cashback from their digital purchases, including Grab and Uber rides, in the past three years.”
In 2017, more than 30 online merchants joined ShopBack Malaysia to provide Cashback as a form of loyalty reward to online shoppers, including Malaysia Airlines, 11street, Uniqlo Online and Kinokuniya. Currently, ShopBack collaborates with more than 500 merchants to offer up to 30% Cashback, and the Cashback percentage tends to increase during the festive period.
“For example, there’ll be products on 100% epic Cashback sale during our birthday next week (22 February 2018). We will be giving away a total of RM18,000 to three lucky winners to spend on Lazada. Nike, Taobao, Booking.com, Photobook, Expedia, Hermo, Cotton-On, Sephora, ZALORA etc. are going to give out higher Cashback on that day too,” Alvin elaborated.
Developing user centric features for better purchasing decisions
While online Cashback still sounds new to locals, ShopBack is confident of its future as this concept has been introduced and is widely used by China, UK and US shoppers for more than a decade.
“There is a bunch of loyalty programmes for offline retail in Malaysia but none comparable to ShopBack’s scale in the online retail space prior to our entry. We reward users in cash form, of which can be transferred into a bank account once it gets validated. What’s better is users are able to stack this on top of their credit card’s Cashback. On the other hand, online merchants see us as a valuable partner in promoting their business to the right target audience and retaining existing customers. We might earn less by sharing our commission with users as Cashback, but this triple-win model will help us go a long way,” Alvin said.
To better support customers in their purchasing journey, ShopBack Malaysia extended its team to support live chat on web, mobile and app platform, as well as Facebook. It also upgraded its app to enable users access to purchase mobile reloads and internet packages offers within one tap, and implemented OTP (one-time-password) for a secure payout process.
Recently, it also rolled out a ‘partial Cashback’ feature where a user can choose to withdraw any available Cashback amount (minimum RM10) from ShopBack to his/her bank account, or utilise it to settle phone bills (Maxis users only). The company is also looking to expand payout options via potential partnerships with popular brands and other loyalty programme providers.
“Moving forward, we want ShopBack to be more than just Cashback. If you look at our app, there’s an exclusive function that allows our users to quickly compare rides and make a decision on the go. That is the kind of smarter way of living that we envision, and we hope to achieve greater milestones with our users in the near future.”