Blogs

Peeraphon Jensubsin, the CEO of Promotions.co.th shares with us the current state of eCommerce in Thailand and his thoughts about the future

Published

5 years ago

08/18/2020

Jean-Pierre

Table of Contents

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID19 times?

Peeraphon Jensubsin: As we’re in Thailand with strong cooperation from the people around. We have managed to contain the spread of Covid-19 for over 40 days now. Which means the country is free from this disease for over a month. We wear masks every time we go out of the house, in the supermarket, and everybody is doing the same thing. Life has drastically changed from the way it was, but we can manage.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined Promotions.co.th

Peeraphon Jensubsin: We started off as a performance marketing company in Thailand since 2008, starting from 3 employees, now we have over 15 working in the company. The performance marketing started in the US over 10 years ago, we believe that it will eventually come here and as expected it landed in Thailand about 6 years ago which made us in an advantage point of having tons of interested clients to join our platform. We now become ads and performance marketing agencies in Thailand, having our own marketplace, we work with 60% of the banks in our country as well as all e-commerce marketplace here.

How does promotions.co.th innovate?

Peeraphon Jensubsin: We follow the trends of the people, literally when they do searches online and we’d know. We usually are there before the trend reaches its peak point and drive those trends into conversions for our working partners. We’re now letting Covid-19 affect business to open free stores in our website Promotions.co.th/market without any charges allowing customers to contact the stores directly via messaging.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business and how are you coping?

Peeraphon Jensubsin: Some customers cut their spending during the pandemic and most of them during April-May 2020 to look out for the changes. We then offer them more variety of business which takes lesser risk in online marketing spending such as cost per sales with no extra production cost. However, the sales volume is definitely impressive like before Covid-19 time.

Did you have to make difficult choices and what are the lessons learned?

Peeraphon Jensubsin: Yes we did. Most companies here try to cut their costs in order to survive, on the other hand, we operate based on sales volume. The key point is to drive the sales in various channels with higher operating cost. The key is to look for more clients who want to grow with us to compensate for the cut budget. With high operating cost, we have to squeeze in man power, outsource the task that we see suitable, we don’t expand head counts but to partner with others with revenue sharing models.

How do you deal with stress and anxiety, how do you project yourself and promotions.co.th in the future ?

Peeraphon Jensubsin: There are bad days and good days, what comes as threat always shows new pathways. Surfing with the trends, making the most reasonable decisions will always be the best thing to do in the crisis. Stress and anxiety comes to everyone, just focus on what gives less stress and wait for the storm to pass, then go back to it again. Everytime there’s a crisis, people tend to turn their heads toward education, and we’re moving toward the education business in the sense of online conversion and marketing in the next 5 years and we are actually working on that project with some advertisers.

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Peeraphon Jensubsin: We literally have all types of competitors in our country, since people/companies are now focusing on online marketing as they can’t do much on Omni Channel, or offline events. Normally, we focus on online conversions based on static contents only, now we’re moving toward dynamic sales and content channels to increase sales and to be different.

Another thing that we’ve been working on for years has been to do handshakes with other agencies, platforms, partnerships to step into the unexplored area. We give them what we’re good at and most of them give us tools to complete the master plan together. Not only those startup companies that we have paired with them, we also tied-in with many advertisers to run ad-hoc projects.

Your final thoughts

Peeraphon Jensubsin: From now on, we expect to see a self-sustaining economy in our country which means we don’t export travel, we don’t import travelers as well as other types of product and service as much as we did in the past. This conveys that the business will be more localized, more buying and selling internally. Localizations, local brands, and even localization of the international brands will play a major role in the next few years from what we forecasted.

People are looking at self-help, home improvements, in-house activities more than ever even some say they will vanish when the cure of the virus comes into play. But what they forget to think is that, people have now developed and cultivated their inner habit of doing things at home more than ever and we believe it is going to stick around for decades.