Created in 2016, Joom is a marketplace with great ambitions. Faced with the fiercest competition, Joom wants to carve out a place for itself among the leaders in e-commerce. Adaptation to the health crisis, strategy of customer loyalty and development, the brand continues to renew itself to remain competitive. Daria Nikolaeva, spokesperson for Joom in Europe, explains Joom’s strategy to conquer an increasingly demanding market.
What is Joom?
Daria Nikolaeva: Joom is a marketplace mainly present on the mobile since 95% of our sales are made by this means. We are also an international company because our priority is to connect customers and sellers around the world. We also work to offer simple and fluid logistics solutions. But that’s not all. Joom is also positioning itself as a pioneer in “social e-commerce”. From our creation, we wanted to offer in Europe this concept of “social commerce” which is very popular in Asia. Clearly, we are developing our e-commerce platform as a real social network. This means that our customers can leave reviews, post pictures of the items they order but also communicate with each other. Moreover, this communication channel has allowed some to stay the course during the pandemic. A very complicated time for many.
Has the health crisis impacted your development strategy?
Daria Nikolaeva: Like all businesses in the world, this crisis has affected us a lot. Despite a difficult economic climate, 2020 has been a year of growth for us. It may sound weird, but it’s during this period of crisis that we have managed to achieve goals that we had never achieved since our creation and even become profitable. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t complicated. We had to face great uncertainty. But we decided to approach this ordeal as a challenge and created a crisis unit. We had to adapt our communication tools to reassure our customers but also educate them about the Covid by relaying the WHO health recommendations via our newsletters. Our first problem to solve was to meet the demand. Our logistics channels suddenly shut down. Thanks to our logistics network, we were able to continue to deliver to our customers. We were successful in doing this because we had multiple logistics channels to each country and we could switch traffic between those channels in real time.
The crisis has therefore profoundly changed the behavior of online purchases.
Daria Nikolaeva: With the closure of physical stores, many people have had no choice but to turn to e-commerce. But not in just any way. They consciously consumed online by opting for better quality products. We have also created a special product inspection which is a manual control service of the goods before sending to the customer. We are the first marketplace to offer it. It was also an opportunity for us to strengthen our influencer marketing, energize our blogging communities by asking them to test our products and post reviews insisting on the fact that they had to be honest to build a real relationship of trust with our customers. The pandemic has really forced e-commerce sites to focus on quality over quantity.
What are the other means that you deploy to capture and retain your customers?
Daria Nikolaeva: We provide our customers with quality and relevant products at attractive prices, but we guarantee their privacy and make their experience fun, easy and flawless at all times. From researching their needs to delivery. To do this, we do a lot of analysis on buying trends and we use artificial intelligence to better understand everyone’s needs. This allows us to offer tailored offers at the best time.
How do you stand out from your competition?
Daria Nikolaeva: Beyond the quality of our products, we have a very qualitative internal support service which is trained in the company’s requirements. It is an essential part of Joom’s strategy. The support teams respond 7 days a week and 24 hours a day to support the customer throughout their journey. This considerably strengthens the relationship of trust.
I take this opportunity to come back to the importance of our community. The opinion of an influencer on our e-commerce platform increases conversion by 187% while the opinion of an average user increases it “only” by 38%. We work with influencers directly on the Joom platform and not just on classic social networks. Joom is really a shopping site with a built-in social network. Concretely, sellers can directly contact influencers via Joom to invite them to test and give their opinion on their products. Today, almost 200 influencers work with us. We invite them to participate in projects, in the life of the platform.
Why would a seller choose Joom over another marketplace?
Daria Nikolaeva: We simply do everything for him! Joom is a simple and practical platform to sell abroad because it is really specialized in cross-border e-commerce. The only job of a seller is to download the products and sell them. We take care of everything else! We offer, beyond the logistical and administrative part, to translate the product descriptions. Today, Joom teams can translate content into 21 different languages. We also take care of the support service so that communication with the customer is as smooth as possible. Without forgetting the standard advertising tools, we integrate sellers in promotions and thematic selections andt all of this is completely free! Finally, thanks to Joom Logisctics, we allow them to deliver in around 200 countries.
This June, Joom will be celebrating its fifth anniversary. What operations are you going to put in place?
Daria Nikolaeva: Obviously, there will be a huge promotion to celebrate this fifth year of existence. Promotion days increase on average the total volume of merchandise sold by 20% on the platform. Which is very interesting for sellers. For our anniversary, we want to achieve 40% growth thanks to a mechanism designed especially for the event.
Moreover, although it is our anniversary, it is our customers who will receive gifts. We have already started pre-sales for loyal customers. From June 1 to 5, we will be organizing a lot of events with bloggers. We will also offer additional discounts on products already sold by our sellers by taking the costs at our expense. And above all, depending on the price of his basket, the customer can choose the gift of his choice from a list of suggested products. And that’s not all, because we will launch a huge campaign on Facebook and YouTube in 10 languages and broadcast in 12 countries including France, Germany, Russia and Spain. At Joom, we have not finished surprising you!
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