Online shopping site assures China shipments COVID-19-free
MANILA, Philippines — Filipino shoppers need not worry that they might get infected by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) if they order goods from China, an e-commerce site’s official told Philstar.com.
“I just wanted to share that the products arrive to the Philippines safely. We do have products that come from our global sellers, that come from China. But it has been medically proven that if you transit your product through the air, there’s actually no chance that any sort of virus actually retains within the package,” Neil Trinidad, Chief Marketing Officer of online shopping site Lazada Philippines, said in a recent interview.
As such, Trinidad said there is no need for them to conduct additional screening or use added equipment to screen the packages because “it has been medically proven that no virus can survive non-human contact on surfaces.”
According to him, only less than half of the products sold on their platform come from China and majority of the goods come from over 50,000 sellers from the Philippines.
Despite the travel bans the Philippines imposed on China and other countries infected by the disease, Trinidad said these had “minimal disruption” in their logistics and operations.
He said the virus’ spread also had no effect on the orders they get from their daily average of four million users, and they have so far not received COVID-19-related complaints.
Before the outbreak, Trinidad recalled that among the most “viral” topics on social media recently was a Filipina who ordered a wedding gown from China through their online platform. He said the gown was the talk of the town because the bride reportedly bought it at a price way cheaper than a gown sold in Divisoria, so she bought many gowns online.
Trinidad shared that they have been seeing a steady growth of women shopping for wedding supplies and for fashion and beauty items, which is why they recently launched a one-stop-shop online destination for fashion and beauty called Beauty by LazMall, together with their platform’s biggest fashion, home and baby supplies sale from February 17 to 21.
Before the outbreak, the online shopping site has been selling about 13 million diapers every sale period. But since the epidemic and the Taal Volcano eruption, “face masks have been one of our fastest-selling” products, said Trinidad.
“So we can’t sell enough because of the demand,” he said. “It’s selling out very quickly. So the minute we run out of masks, we ask our sellers to replenish. There’s a lot of demand right now.”
According to him, Lazada for Good, the company’s program launched last year to enable people to donate as easily as ordering online, has turned over and remitted over 10,000 donations to their partner non-government organizations like Caritas Manila.
