Online shopping platform AirAsia Shop is planning to introduce more retail vendors from October as part of plans to broaden the merchandise assortment, TRBusiness has learned.

As reported, the Malaysian low-cost carrier is continuing its journey to become a one-stop digital lifestyle platform after launching new ecommerce fascia AirAsia Shop in August, which offers home delivery for customers.

In addition to offering a wide range of duty free products and special monthly promotions available for home delivery, order for collection at ground shops and pick-up inflight, AirAsia Shop is diversifying its range to serve travellers and non-travellers alike.

“With the vision of AirAsia Shop, we are not just limited to duty free,” explained Rose Lam, Group Head of Ancillary Commercial at AirAsia.com. “We are actually looking at cross-border overseas products, so things with unique, local backgrounds such as designers from Thailand and face masks from Korea that might not be accessible without a big logistics cost.”

SCALING UP FULFILMENT OPTIONS

In an interview for the TRBusiness October issue, available soon, Lam revealed plans to select merchants offering lucrative opportunities to supply new products to destinations such as Peninsular Malaysia and Thailand, one example being Malaysia pewter manufacturer Royal Selangor.

With that in mind, AirAsia Shop is looking to outlets to source pre-season brand products that are not bound by international duty free laws.

While AirAsia Shop enjoys access to a (ordinarily) sizeable passenger base, including millions of AirAsia ‘Big’ loyalty members keen to ‘earn and burn’ points, traditional fulfilment options for international flights remain challenged.

To assuage some of this pressure, AirAsia has tried to deliver as large a shopping assortment as possible on its domestic flights, explains Lam.

Of course, more tightly regulated export sales such as liquor continue to be handicapped by the dearth in international flights, but where sales are permitted in local markets AirAsia is capitalising on the sales opportunity.

“We will maximise wherever we can to offer those products to them, so they can pre-book to get them delivered onboard and can pick them up at the airport,” confirmed Lam. “Those options are still available.

“How quickly we can scale them back to where we were before will be highly dependent on flight schedules. One of our USPs is about bringing convenience for consumers with the travel retail shopping experience so you can order anywhere and anytime.”

AirAsia Shop plans to rollout to Thailand by the end of the year after obtaining a licence to operate a duty free bonded warehouse.

The Philippines is expected to follow, either by the end of this year or early next year, with plans to expand into Indonesia in the future.

For more on AirAsia Shop, watch out for the October issue of TRBusiness.