|
BANGKOK, Oct. 31-- Young Thai clothing designers Nunthapong Boonnao and Manassawee Suangkaew used to run a store to sell clothes they create in the Thai capital. In 2018 they decided to close their store to set up an online clothing shop in Lazada, a major online shopping company in Southeast Asia. "Lazada is one of the earliest e-commerce websites in Thailand, and we took advantage of that by setting up our own store on the website in early 2018," Nunthapong said. Thanks to the rise of online shopping in Thailand, the 18-month-old online clothes store named "LOONNY" is thriving. Nunthapong and Manassawee said the online clothing store has raked in income three times more than the physical store. Founded in 2017, Lazada is now one of the regional leading e-commerce marketplaces. In 2016, China's e-commerce giant Alibaba acquired the controlling stakes of Lazada, and started to export new business strategies and cutting-edge technologies to the Southeast Asian platform. Live-streaming feature, one of the business strategies and technical supports that Alibaba provides, became an instant hit in Thailand, luring especially young Thais to go online shopping. In China, Taobao Live, the Alibaba live-streaming sales platform, reached a turnover of 100 billion yuan (about 14.93 billion U.S. dollars) in 2018, with an annual growth rate of 400 percent. More than 600,000 varieties of commodities are sold via the platform. | 
