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Lotte Duty Free describes its Online Store as “the world’s best online duty free shop”. During the pandemic its key goals were to enhance foreign customers’ convenience and maintain its leading position in the global online duty free market. A key development in the past year was to extend the Online Store to Vietnam, “laying the foundation to expand our customer base to Vietnamese customers”, according to Lotte Duty Free. The company said that it is pre-empting the recovery by providing service in key languages to attract customers once the market normalises. Lotte Duty Free Online Store now supports five languages – Korean, English, Japanese, Chinese (both simplified and traditional), and Vietnamese.

Extended payment platforms was another big initiative, with UnionPay App payment service introduced for the first time in Korea in July 2020, and the Huabei payment service from October the same year. Lotte Duty Free said: “Despite a fall in sales due to COVID-19, Lotte Duty Free Online Store managed to deliver sales of about KRW3.3 trillion (US$2.9 billion) from January 2020 to April 2021. It posted about the same foreign sales year-on-year amid the pandemic. “The pandemic is still ongoing and it has not been that long since the updates, so the introductions of Vietnamese online store and new Chinese payment services may not be the main driver for the sales performance. [But] we are now geared up to welcome more Vietnamese and Chinese customers online when the pandemic ends.”