#MarketingExcellenceAwards 2022 highlight: ASUS Singapore’s best practice in eCommerce marketing

This post is sponsored by ASUS.

ASUS is known for its laptops, desktops, motherboards, monitors, graphics cards, and routers. The pandemic saw the rapid development of eCommerce, and ASUS quickly recognised that digitally transforming itself would be vital to maintaining its standing in the industry.

Their marketing strategies were well executed and impressed the judges, winning the bronze award for Excellence in eCommerce Marketing at MARKETING INTERACTIVE’s Marketing Excellence Awards 2022. 

Challenge

Consumers’ shopping behaviour is ever changing and this has been accelerated due to the pandemic, which we see more consumers in Singapore purchase higher ticket products online.

From the most recent internal IDC Report, the percentage of online sales of all laptops and desktops versus offline sales has grown to more than 20% in the Singapore market. Within the growth of online purchases, 35% of such consumers choose shipping options such as curbside pick-up, or click-and-collect, to receive their orders in time, according to a recent research survey by Shopify.

While this behaviour is happening, there is still limited choices of click-and-collect locations when they shop online at asus.com/sg.

When consumers opt to pick up their orders in-store, 58% of customers make additional purchases when collecting an online order in-store, according to Insider Retailer

Authorised bricks and mortar retailers have been under great pressure as consumers are shifting their purchases online, especially in recent years. On top of that, more and more manufacturers have been seen to be adopting a D2C (direct-to-consumers) approach where they compete with such retailers by selling directly to the end-consumers through their own brand.com and online marketplaces.

Solution

To address these problems and opportunities, there is a need for not just a complementing business model, but an extensive, yet efficient commerce system and workflow, that allows the integration to our retailers’ ERP system, and other services.

While manufacturers worldwide are cutting out the middleman by taking a D2C approach, ASUS Singapore is the only PC brand that is embracing the middleman to complement the authorised retailers.

What ASUS has come up with is a complementing business model where consumers can shop directly from the brand. Customers are familiar with the ASUS online store, allowing customers to purchase laptops or desktops online and choose to collect the products from their preferred retailer.

With the rising trend of webrooming, more and more consumers are browsing online and purchasing in-store, and this has been addressed by ASUS’ solution.

For consumers who want to touch and feel the devices before purchasing, ASUS’ online store provides a real-time stock status linked to the offline store. Customers can check it before heading down to their preferred retailer nearby who is carrying that item.

With this in place, ASUS Singapore created the ASUS digital marketplace to help its authorised retailers grow their bricks and mortar business while giving consumers more options to receive their orders when they shop at the ASUS online store.

Execution

To achieve these experiences, ASUS Singapore, with the support from SmartOSC, used Adobe Commerce 2, hosted on Adobe Commerce Cloud, to create the ASUS digital marketplace that connects to its authorised retailers’ ERP/POS for real-time synchronisation of their inventories and orders.

This integration allows for inventories to be picked up and reflected on ASUS’ online store in real-time, and orders to be passed through directly to its authorised resellers’ ERP for order fulfilment when customers place an order through the ASUS online store. 

On the payment end, there was a need to simplify the payment processes to not disrupt or burden the administrative team of its authorised resellers, hence, ASUS Singapore appointed and worked with the region’s leading payment gateway 2C2P to achieve this.

By implementing 2C2P’s spilt payment feature, it allows funds and payments to be made directly from the customer to the fulfilment part when customers pay with their credit/debit card for their order on ASUS’ online store.

The delivery of this project was made possible with the strong expertise of SmartOSC, from many months of system design, development, and integrations.

Result

Since its implementation in April 2022, the ASUS digital marketplace initiative has contributed a 10% incremental in transactions for its online store and has helped increase device sales by over 9.15% on one of its authorised retailers.

In addition, revenue and transactions for the ASUS online store have registered a 58.11% and 37.14% YoY increase respectively in Q2, 2022. The conversion rate has also registered a 35.93% YoY increase while the average order value has seen a 15.29% YoY increase in Q2, 2022.

The ASUS digital marketplace initiative has not only helped the growth of its digital business, but has also garnered positive coverage from the press and media around the region. Globally, this initiative has also been awarded as the finalist of the recent 2022 Adobe Experience Maker Awards under The Disrupter category.