Hong Kong-based social fashion and commerce platform Viss has received a round of strategic seed investment from Clive Ng and Christian Remrod via their company 8 Plus Holding.

Clive Ng is the chairman and founder of AsiaContent, MTV Japan, China Cablecom, and Fashion Networks International. While Christian Remrod is the managing director of Fairchild Fashion Media (Conde Nast Group) and the founder of Fashion Networks. No financial details of the funding were disclosed.

Founded by Ivy Wong and Leo Ku last September, Viss has recorded 2.8 million monthly unique visitors (MUV) and 18 million monthly page views to date. It also has apps for iPhone and Android (pictured below). When we last reported about the startup back in January this year, it had only 600,000 unique visitors and 3.5 million monthly page views. This means that the startup has grown by more than over 400 percent in terms of unique visitors.

Perhaps that’s due to the well-made and sleek product produced by the team which got featured on Apple App Store’s ‘New and Noteworthy’ and ‘What’s Hot’ sections in 14 Asian countries.

Ivy Wong, founder at Viss shared more of her thoughts today:

Viss aims to rewire the connection between curated user-generated content, brands engagement, and commerce. This is extremely powerful as we are hitting the sweet spots on generating brand awareness and engagement and conversion.

With the new funding and key connections, Viss plans to expand its geographic reach, work with brands for engagement and commerce partnerships, and also establish global media partnerships. “Not only we want to make it super fun and easy for fashionistas to share their looks and stories, we also want to reward them with both exposures and brand partnership opportunities,” Ivy added.

One other such social fashion app we looked at recently is Zoolook, which is made by a team split across Tokyo and Hong Kong.

Get the Viss apps for iOS or Android.

Food delivery site Foodpanda has been making headlines a lot recently. First with a $20 million financing round and then a rebrand in Vietnam. Today, Foodpanda has announced a merger with former rival Singapore Dine, though the terms of the deal haven’t been made public.

The Rocket Internet-backed startup claims to be “the market leading food delivery company in Singapore” with this merger.

Kiren Tanna, CEO Asia at Foodpanda in Singapore, said about the merger:

The merge with Singapore Dine makes us by far the market leader in the Singaporean food delivery market. Customers who want to order at Singapore Dine will be redirected to Foodpanda.sg in future to access the broadest culinary variety from more than 200 restaurants delivering island-wide. We are very happy that we can offer the leading and best food delivery platform in Singapore.

Singapore Dine started up in 2010, promising to offer “the widest index of eateries in Singapore, including buffets, coffee places, hawker centers, restaurants and more.” All those delivery options now transfer over to Foodpanda.

Foodpanda operates in nine countries across Asia.

Meituan’s T-shirts for gay couples.

Today and tomorrow is a sort of Chinese Valentine’s, so it’s an apt time for couples to be thinking of one another. That explains the timing behind China’s most surprising daily deal being offered by a Groupon-style site. The homegrown deals startup Meituan is offering a free trip to Vancouver, Canada, for one gay couple to go get legally married in that country.

The deal is being offered for free (see it here) to one Chinese gay couple. While Canada has legalized same-sex marriage, China hasn’t, so the resultant marriage certificate will be just a fancy piece of paper once the couple returns to Big Red.

Meituan’s free deal will cover travel expenses and one night of accommodation for the couple in Vancouver. Only one couple can win, with a draw to be held tomorrow to choose a winner. So far, nearly 80,000 people have entered to win.

As the site points out, same-sex couples do not need a Canadian residence permit or any such paperwork in order to get hitched there, and it can be done in a “very convenient” way on a tourist visa. Other cities and nations have been encouraging gay tripper tourism like this. I’m not sure why Meituan chose Canada over the US, but perhaps it’s because maple syrup is awesome – or because a wedding day can be rather ruined by being shot in the head.

As a sign that China’s youngsters are a lot more open than the traditionalism displayed by authorities, Meituan’s deals page hails “true love, regardless of gender” and calls on gay Chinese to “bravely get married”. Last year Meituan gave out free rainbow T-shirts for the two Chinese Valentine’s days. Today is the day for men to profess their love, while tomorrow is for women to reciprocate.

Meituan is China’s largest indie deals site right now with 13.1 percent market share in the highly fractured market. It pulls in over $150 million per month in transactions.

(Hat-tip to @bokane for spotting this)

Singapore-based luxury private flash sales site Reebonz (pronounced ‘ribbons’) has completed a $40 million (S$50 million) financing round led by Singapore’s media giant MediaCorp.

Other investors in this round are Vertex Asia Investments, Granite Global Ventures, Intel Capital, Matrix Partners China, and Infocomm Investments, the venture arm of Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore. This financing round values Reebonz at about $200 million (S$250 million).

Reebonz offers short-duration, online private sales events, which are exclusively open to members only. Registration to Reebonz is free. Sales events are for both women’s and men’s brands and are modeled around the concept of ‘accessible luxury’ with up to 70 percent discount.

MediaCorp CEO Shaun Seow told his own network, Channel News Asia (CNA):

We see great alignment between what Reebonz does and what MediaCorp has – audiences, content targeted at the luxury market and our star power. We are confident that by collaborating closely with Reebonz, we’ll see even more breakthroughs from the retailer

Reebonz was founded in March 2009 by Samuel Lim, Daniel Lim, and Benjamin Han who haven’t been speaking much to the tech press recently. Many Singaporean entrepreneurs and investors have long thought of Reebonz as one of the most promising internet companies in the nation. Besides, Reebonz.com, the founders also run Kwerkee.com, a store for designer-created items that was started in April 2012.

Reebonz’s success is built upon layers of experience. Prior to Reebonz, Samuel founded Fusion Mobile in 2000, a mobile content business that was later acquired by a Malaysian listed company in 2007. In 2004, Samuel founded Fusion Direct, a company that did database marketing, and that was acquired by a Singapore listed company in 2010.

Samuel, who’s the CEO at Reebonz, told CNA that with this investment he wishes to “build a world-class billion-dollar Internet commerce group out from Singapore.”

Dr Lim Kuo-Yi, CEO of Infocomm Investments, echoed Samuel’s mission and told us:

We are excited to be working with Samuel, his team, and fellow investors in growing Reebonz as the top online luxury retailer in Asia. It is our mission to support our Infocomm startups to expand internationally, and we are confident Reebonz will show it is possible to build a great startup from Singapore.

Prior to this MediaCorp-led financing round, Reebonz has also received funding from Vertex Asia Investment and Intel Capital. Headquartered in Singapore, Reebonz has regional offices in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, Shanghai, and Korea.

(Source: CNA)

I recently read an article titled “Date A Boy Who Travels”, which reminds me of the female version “Date A Girl Who Travels”. We have to admit, as we expose ourselves to situations during our travels that are out of our usual comfort zone, we tend to develop a deeper appreciation for the little things in life. And often such experiences will only come about when you truly immerse yourself in local experiences. Now, there’s a new startup dedicated to searching for such authentic travel: Indiescapes.

The Singapore-based startup, in essence, is a curated marketplace dedicated to wanderlusts who seek out local, authentic travel experiences. From living like a Balinese villager to embarking on a Thailand street food crawl with the country’s top local food writer, travellers will be able to find experiences that are different from what normal travel packages from travel agencies can offer.

And once a guest makes a booking request, the request will be sent to the host. The guest will only be able to make payment after the host accepts the booking. To ensure both parties’ interests are being protected, Indiescapes will hold payment and transfer it after the day-one experience has been delivered. Indiescapes then takes a percentage cut from each successful transaction.

The curated travel marketplace also boasts best-quality listings for its customers, making sure that each host goes through its strict curation procedures which, for some, includes a face-to-face meeting. Co-founder and CEO Seetoh Zhi Min at Indiescapes elaborates on how the team curates content for its users:

We seek for these experiences through our local contacts and an extensive travel network of friends. We speak to the hosts, understand why they do and what they do, because we believe it is very important to find hosts who have a genuine desire to provide a unique journey for travellers. This way, we ensure customers get only the best, and help them save time crawling through the overcrowded internet.

There will be reviews, references, and social elements within the package to help users decide if the hosts can deliver a good experience for them.

As for hosts, there are also cancellation policies in place to protect them, making sure that they receive bookings only from guests who are genuinely interested in the experience. Similarly, hosts would be able to write reviews and references on the users.

Co-founders Heidi Shum and Zhi Min are currently working with a team of six members focusing on customer outreach, web development, and host community building. As to why the two ladies decided to embark on this journey, Zhi Min explains:

[...] I always had the chance to live like a local and have my friends share insights of their countries with me. Heidi too, [during] her stays and travels, also had the privilege of experiencing countries from very local perspectives.

[And] when we finally returned to Singapore after years of wandering the world independently, many of our friends started asking us for tips on authentic experiences when they travel. [We then] realized that what is easily available on the market is usually the touristy and commercialized stuff. Driven by a common desire to make more prevalent the same kind of authentic experiences that have greatly influenced our world views, Heidi and I started Indiescapes.

This definitely sounds like a good option for an alternative travel experience, especially for wanderlusts like myself. I truly believe one of the best ways to expand your horizons, to show empathy, and to understand another’s culture is to see and experience matters from a local’s perspective.

Indiescape currently focuses on countries within Southeast Asia, such as Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia. The experiences currently listed on the site range from $35 for a night life experience in Bangkok to $410 for a three day experience at Khao Sok Park. If you’re a traveler seeking out for local experiences, you might want to check out Indiescapes here.

The fashion-loving Japanese startup Muse & Co has raised 350 million yen, about $3.4 million, in series B funding for its fledgling e-commerce business. The primary investors are Itochu Technology Ventures, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and Infinity Ventures Partners (IVP); this round comes exactly a year after a smaller first round.

Muse & Co aims itself at Japan’s savviest and most stylish shoppers – which are of course young, professional women. It’s a VIP flash sales site, something we’ve seen prove popular in the country with Luxa.jp, Monoco, Glamour Sales, and numerous others.

According to Startup-Dating, Muse & Co CEO Hirotake Kubo has revealed that the startup has 200,000 users and sees $500,000 in monthly sales, with 50 percent of that income from mobile shoppers. A whacking 70 percent of its traffic comes from mobile devices. The e-store has apps for iPhone and Android.

Started up in February 2012, the flash sales site has now grown to comprise 20 staffers. Like many such niche e-commerce services, it has a limited amount of items for sale each day – in Muse & Co’s case, just 30 – and flash sales on these last for just a week. It claims that most garments sell out before that deadline.

(Source: Startup-Dating)

We recently ran a guest post on the blogshop phenomenon in Singapore, and as Lucas highlighted in the article, payment is the most critical step which closes the entire shopping cycle. But at times it gets rather troublesome and tedious, since bank transfers were the only option available when the idea of blogshops first came about. It takes a long time, especially with bigger blogshops, to wait for sellers to manually verify the payment. That has also been a barrier to e-commerce startups in Singapore who might want to attract overseas customers.

I agree with one of our readers’ comments that it does get inconvenient. Unfortunately, we have neither a local Taobao-like marketplace nor Alipay system in Singapore, where the transaction only goes through after the buyer has received and is satisfied with the goods purchased. With bank transfers, the safety of purchases is not guaranteed, and often buyers would opt to shop at bigger blogshops for fear of losing their money.

Yet e-commerce is booming in Singapore. From popular local online supermarket RedMart to online blog clothing stores such as Love, Bonito and Agneselle, to online beading businesses such as Manek-Manek beads, we’re seeing more and more small businesses being brought online.

Easier e-payments for going global

Now with proper payment gateways such as PayPal in place, the ease of payment is encouraging more merchants to bring their brands into international markets as well. In fact, most of the bigger blogshops have adopted credit card payments and support PayPal, which also caters to international shoppers. According to Helena Tang-Lim, founder at Manek-Manek beads, almost 90 percent of her transactions hail from outside of Singapore.

Helena also tells us that she has integrated PayPal since day one of starting her online beading business, and attributes her wider customer base to the payment platform service. She elaborates:

PayPal has helped eliminate the need for a physical presence overseas and allowed me to sell to the world. [...] Furthermore, their experience in risk management and fraud prevention enables me to provide a safer e-commerce platform to connect to my customers. PayPal’s closed loop system also allowed me to identify good consumers, and remove the bad ones to minimize fraud.

But of course, one of the biggest pull factors for Helena’s online business, she explains, is that she provides a complete experience that makes customers feel as though they are receiving a Christmas present whenever they receive a parcel from Manek-Manek beads. She also makes sure that her designs are easy to match, and has an added Asian accent to her designs which appeals to the international market.

Etsy ranked fifth in most searched online stores

She also has her designs listed on popular online marketplace Etsy, one of the more popular online handicrafts stores, which helps aid and improve in her brand visibility.

In fact, according to the recent statistics provided by PayPal, the top two spots in the e-commerce export categories from Singapore are jewelry and fashion. Just in Southeast Asia alone, there are around 1.5 million active PayPal accounts. Faraz Ahmed, general manager at PayPal Southeast Asia and India, adds:

Our primary business in Singapore is to enable more convenient and secure transactions for local merchants to sell to over 123 million active PayPal users in 190 markets worldwide. Our data and insights clearly show that Singapore SMEs have a fantastic opportunity to reach out to millions of consumers globally and aggressively expand into overseas markets through cross-border e-commerce.

In fact, around 25 percent of PayPal’s businesses globally are cross-border, which shows how local brands are taking advantage of the ease of payment to cross into other geographical regions, into international markets.

This rumor comes to us, as many do, from Sina Tech’s “knowledgable” sources, and should be taken with a grain of salt until it has been announced by Alibaba (the company does not comment on rumors). Supposedly, the idea is, among other things, that the box could lead to TV-based e-commerce. But as Xiaomi learned last fall, offering a set-top box requires a government license that can only come through a mandatory partnership with a few state-approved media providers, so if Alibaba is serious about the project it will need to partner up with one of them.

But the bigger hurdle might be Aliyun OS itself, which despite massive investment from Alibaba hasn’t really taken off as the Android competitor the company hoped it could become. At present, it’s not really clear what consumers would get out of Alibaba’s set-top box that they couldn’t get from many of the other available offerings, and I’m skeptical that people really want to do much shopping on their TV sets. But I’ve been known to be wrong, and betting against Alibaba often proves unwise, so who knows. If Ali really is working on a set-top box, it’s definitely something to watch for.

(via Sina Tech)

I wrote about Vietnam’s food delivery landscape earlier this month, and already there are some new developments in the space. Today, Rocket Internet is finally bringing Vietnam into the branding fold by changing the name of its own food delivery service from Hungrypanda to Foodpanda.

The rebranding just means that the previous domain, Hungrypanda.vn that Vietnamese users have been going to for their deliveries will be shooting over to Foodpanda.vn. As Don Phan, the managing director at Foodpanda says:

We are excited to be now part of the global Foodpanda movement. The rebrand and our new, big partners take us further towards becoming Vietnam’s leading food delivery service. For our customers, we want to provide the best and most convenient way of ordering food.

The rebranding also comes along with the announcement that Foodpanda.vn has now integrated Gloria Jean’s Coffees, NYDC, BreadTalk, Tokyo Deli, and Subway onto their list of deliverables.

Despite the three big factors of uniting with the international brand, getting a huge infusion of cash, and getting some new restaurants on their online menu, Foodpanda is still going to have to work hard to deal with local incumbents, Eat.vn and Vietnammm, which have been in the market since 2011. So I wouldn’t say Foodpanda is on top of the Vietnamese market yet – it still got some way to go. That being said, Rocket’s two other big, Southeast Asia-oriented e-commerce properties, Lazada and Zalora, have been outspending local e-commerce sites in Vietnam and seeing huge growth spurts. The same is true for the chat apps like KakaoTalk, Zalo, and Line, who have seen huge user increases as they’ve upped their spending on television ads and visibility in the country. With a product as simple and consumer-scalable as food delivery, is it a matter of time before Foodpanda steamrolls the local incumbents? We’ll see.

Last week we reported that Foodpanda raised over $20 million to expand across Asia. It already operates in nine Asian countries.

The one millionth customer was Singaporean mum-to-be Kelly Nguyen, who was surprised by the Zalora team at her workplace, who handed over her order (a maternity dress) free of charge.

The Zalora crew also concocted a little infographic (below) to show some of its other stats. For example, the e-commerce service has shipped to 16,853 towns in the region so far, and over 23,000 new products are added to the site each week. To hold all that stock, the company has over 20,000 square meters of warehouse space, which is the equivalent of five football fields.

Zalora released its iPhone app last month, and attracted a further $26 million in funding back in March.

Alibaba CEO, Jonanthan Lu and his management team

Now that we’ve heard Jack Ma’s final speech as Alibaba’s CEO, we can focus on his successor, Jonathan Lu. Compared to Ma, fewer people will have heard of Lu. But Ma’s last big decision at Alibaba as CEO was perhaps to appoint Lu as CEO.

In his first speech as Alibaba CEO last Friday, Jonathan Lu thanked Ma for giving the one-time waiter at a hotel a chance to shine under Alibaba’s wings. Lu’s leadership quality and great execution has seen him in several leadership positions within Alibaba. 13 years in Alibaba made him one of the early team members to have followed Ma’s journey, seeing the e-commerce firm grow from a David to a Goliath.

I have translated most (like 90+ percent) of his speech. If anything, his speech somewhat echoed Ma’s thoughts which centered around Alibaba’s mission, values, responsibilities, and customers.

“If not me, who? If not now, when?”

Jonathan Lu: Hi family and friends. Today marks my 13th anniversary working with Alibaba. I’m very thankful, as Mr. Jack Ma says, “We are lucky.” But for me, I think that I’m extremely lucky. Because from tomorrow onwards, I’m taking over Alibaba’s mission, our values, responsibility. Taking over our vision of having an open and responsible internet spirit.

I worked at Alibaba’s B2B website for more than three years […] and Taobao for about four years and then back to B2B (Alibaba.com), and then on to big data and also managed our mobile operating system, Yun OS. Through this journey, I learned a lot. But I feel more gratitude. It is because of all of you, that’s why I’m able to learn and grow. It is because of our customers who have helped us grow. I’m very thankful to everyone and Jack Ma. Before Alibaba, I was working in a hotel as a waiter.

Jonathan Lu and Jack Ma saying their thanks with a hug

But today, I have this chance to take over Alibaba’s culture, fight for our dream. This is really an honor. Alibaba been through a lot and our mission and values are what we need to uphold. We insist that customers are our number one priority. In the future, we will continue to uphold and pass on our values and mission. […]

Today, because we have so many customers and so much data, we have a chance to let every customer be on the platform and have their own space and growth opportunities. Alibaba and Taobao are built for the customers. I hope our team can achieve our mission and let Alibaba’s customers enjoy the best experience when they are onboard our platforms.

Another thing we need to uphold is innovation. For the last 13 years, from Alibaba B2B, Taobao, Alipay [online payment solution], Juhuasuan [deals site], Aliyun [cloud computing], to AliFinance [micro-financing service], we have been innovating from the very start and will continue to do so in the future. My team and I will push harder for innovation. […]

For the last 13 years, Alibaba has done very well in upholding its belief and executing our plans. […] Everyone has this signature at the end of their emails: “If not me, who? If not now, when?”

This is a responsibility, a task […] A big dream and vision requires good execution to complete it. Because of our great execution, customers trust us better. […] Thanks to our customers, partners, and competitors who allow us to continue fighting. Our customers give us warmth. Taobao went through seven non-profitable years, but it has grown thanks to customers’ trust. In the future, the thing that pushes us forward is our dream and family.

Moving forward, I hope we can continue to gain the support of our customers, friends, partners, and family. And I hope everyone at Alibaba and Taobao can stay happy and lead a fruitful life. Thank you, everyone!

Image credit: www.agneselle.com

It is not known who first created the word blogshop or started the first ever blogshop in Singapore, but blogshops have become a huge phenomenon in Singapore, with four of the country’s ten most-searched stores being blogshops. A blogshop is an online fashion store that uses a blog such as Livejournal to conduct business online. Blogshops usually sell women’s clothing and accessories for affordable prices ranging from $12 to $30.

Origins of Blogshops

Blogshops – Love Bonito, Agneselle, Hollyhoque, Dressabelle

In the early years of the blogshop industry (2006-2008), the owners were young females aged between 16 and 20. Most of them were still in school and didn’t start out with the aim of being entrepreneurs. Many thought it was a fun and easy way of selling off their secondhand apparel online, and the money earned from these sales would go towards funding their future fashion purchases.

After a few months, some realized the potential of fashion e-commerce and the huge market of customers who were willing to spend between $15 to $40 for a piece of clothing online without needing a physical fitting. Looking to fulfill the demand of their customers, these owners went to source from apparel importers at City Plaza in Singapore and some even went on frequent sourcing trips to Bangkok to bring back large supplies of cheap clothing.

How do they sell clothing on blogs?

It seemed questionable to start a business using Livejournal blogs with the lack of a proper web framework, inventory control, checkout and payment processing systems. But these young female entrepreneurs were not deterred and came up with various unique hacks. The four points below were crucial factors that contributed to the success and popularity of blogshops in the competitive e-commerce industry:

1. Weekly time-specified launches

As a small business starting out, it would be difficult to stock up clothing in hundreds of different designs without incurring large expenses of warehouse storage cost and labour costs. Instead, blogshops introduced a series of five to ten different designs with limited availability in the form of a themed collection format. The collection would launch weekly at night between 7pm and 10pm, and customers were informed through email newsletter a few days before the actual launch.

2. Backorders

Backorders were available a few days after a successful selling out of a collection launch; it also gave those customers who missed out on the launch an opportunity to purchase sold out designs. It was guaranteed income for the owners, as customers would need to pay upfront to purchase sold out designs that were on backorder. Backorders would take two to six weeks to arrive before they were shipped to customers. The amount of designs available on a backorder was an indicator of the popularity of a blogshop.

3. Gmail

Gmail was a must-have tool of any blogshop owner. Firstly, It was used to issue order invoices manually to customers after they commented on the items they wanted on Livejournal. Secondly, blogshops sent mailers in bulk to inform customers of pending launches and the arrival of backorders. Thirdly, Gmail labels were used as a tool to keep track of those who had made payment by tallying the payment details of buyers’ bank accounts against the owners’ bank accounts. Popular blogshops often exceeded Gmail’s 500 daily messages sending limit during the launch of a new fashion collection.

4. Trust

Payment is an important mechanism to close the purchase loop in e-commerce. However when shopping at blogshops, buyers had no choice but to trust sellers with upfront payments to sellers’ accounts. POSB/DBS internet banking was the primary choice of payment accepted by sellers, but buyers often had to wait up to 48 hours for their payment to be manually verified by sellers through email.

There was no payment protection for sellers in the case of non-fulfilled orders, thus buyers preferred shopping at the more popular blogshops to avoid getting scammed. While it was slow and inefficient for owners to verify every single payment email, there were no transaction costs involved and most customers had an active POSB or DBS account.

Stay tuned for part two of my look at the blogshop phenomenon where I will talk about the golden age of blogshops and the top blogshops in Singapore.

E-shopping marketplace Taobao has been aggressively expanding to Hong Kong and Taiwan. With 1.4 million registered users already in Hong Kong, Taobao today announced at a media event in Hangzhou, China, that it has recently launched a Hong Kong official site at hk.taobao.com.

The official Hong Kong site is customized for a Hong Kong audience in many ways. It features products that Hong Kong users are most likely to buy and also offers a guide to educate users on payments. The design of the site is also much cleaner and neater compared to the China version of Taobao.

Taobao in Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore

Elsewhere, Taobao is also enjoying growth in Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore. By the end of 2012, there were 600,000 users in Taiwan, 210,000 in Malaysia, and 280,000 in Singapore. Daphne Lee, director of international business at Taobao, also shared that Malaysia is seeing explosive growth at the moment. In Malaysia, Taobao is experiencing 78 percent growth in monthly paying unique visitors and also 97 percent growth in daily pageviews.

The countries which are outside of mainland China that Taobao are targeting so far have a significant Chinese-speaking population. Taobao hopes to service the Chinese-speaking audience first before moving on to serve non-Chinese speaking customers. Daphne also pointed out that Singapore is an important market for Taobao since it is a country that uses both Chinese and English languages which could possibly provide Taobao with some data and experience on how to cope with an English speaking market.

A fun fact which Daphne pointed out is that Singaporean shoppers tend to buy winter clothing on Taobao. Well, as you may know, Singapore is really freaking warm all year round. So there aren’t really any offline stores to buy winter clothing for travelers – so online shops like Taobao become the go-to destination for rare items like winter clothing.

While it might seem like a piece of cake for Taobao to expand from country to country, there’s actually a lot of ground work to be done. Daphne highlighted four fundamental building blocks which her team are constantly tackling: process, logistics, payments, and customer service.

As of June 2012, Taobao has more than 800 million product listings and 500 million registered users worldwide. Today is also Taobao’s 10th anniversary and also a day that Jonathan Lu officially takes over from Jack Ma as Alibaba’s CEO.

The debate in Indonesia about the upcoming government regulations for the e-commerce industry is still ongoing. While the regulations are now official, they won’t be enacted until the ministry regulation drafts (RPM) ¹ are specified and finalized.

Those regulations – to be fully enacted in 2015 – have the potential to really complicate and hinder the e-commerce industry in Indonesia. The e-commerce players here, represented by the Indonesian e-commerce association (Idea), voiced their concerns to the government at a public discussion held a couple of days ago.

Kompas did a good job yesterday in summarizing the big points of discussion during that talk. Here are four of them:

1. Where are the incentives?

If the government wants to support the e-commerce industry, rather than creating further regulations, the industry will be better off if given incentives. At least the government should also provide the latter.

East Ventures co-founder Willson Cuaca ² explained that the Singapore government is more focused on building the infrastructure rather than compiling regulations. The government gives funding incentives to help the startups as well as building the infrastructure like tens of thousands of free WiFi spots all over the country.

2. Sketchy definitions

The other concern is about the sketchy definitions laid out on the new regulations. Two definitions in the spotlight here are for “electronic transactions” and “public service.” First, there are quite a few online activities going on around the various e-commerce business models. For example, there aren’t any transactions between the buyer and seller happening inside C2C marketplace TokoBagus so, in this case the company acts only as a platform. Is TokoBagus culpable of the government’s regulations concerning the online transaction clause?

‘Idea’ demands the government clarify which processes are deemed as electronic transactions.

‘Idea’ also does not agree on the point where e-commerce players are specified as public services. Head of public policy and government relations of Google Indonesia, Shinto Nugroho, argued that e-commerce cannot be put in the same place as a hospital. He said that all the activities and processes happening inside the e-commerce trade are fully private, and everyone has freedom whether they want to shop online or not.

According to other definitions of public service mentioned on previous regulations like the UU no. 25/2009 and PP no. 96/2012, e-commerce players cannot be classified as a public service.

3. Data centers in Indonesia are more expensive

The argument from the government side is this: Indonesian e-commerce sites need to use local data centers for security purposes. if there is a violation of law due to e-commerce activities, then the government can easily investigate the matter by looking into the internet data stored inside the local data centers. The same cannot be achieved if the e-commerce players are using data centers in other countries.

Fact of the matter is, most of the e-commerce players in Indonesia use data centers in other countries because they are more affordable. Multiply Indonesia country manager Daniel Tumiwa and Biznet Network president director Adi Kusma said that the cost of local data centers here is two times more than the ones abroad.

This is where the issue of incentives arises again. The government should take a deeper look into the fate of the e-commerce industry.

There is one exception to this regulation though, and that is if the players are using tier 4 data centers, then it is okay to use foreign ones. That’s because there aren’t any tier 4 data centers yet in Indonesia.

4. Local domains

There is also a clause obligating the nation’s e-commerce sites to use local “.id.” domains. The reason behind it is similar to the data center argument, which is for e-commerce security for the public.

Tokopedia co-founder William Tanuwijaya – together with some of the other players – don’t agree with this clause, arguing that it can hinder local e-commerce sites from competing globally. He pointed out an example that even China – whose internet industry is filled with a lot of local content – doesn’t mandate the usage of local domains for business.

Daniel asked if there are a lot of frauds and scams happening in the e-commerce sector, and if that is just a really small portion compared to the industry as a whole. The government official answered that there are a lot of reports lodged with the government concerning such security risks. But who knows what the authorities mean by “a lot”.

Fending off potential foreign players?

All in all, the e-commerce industry players are hoping that the upcoming regulation can be more supportive than being a hindrance. But so far, it is looking more like the latter. There is still hope that the government can amend some of the clauses to better suit the needs of the industry.

On the other hand, there is this theory that the lengthy certifications and data center requirements are done in order to stave off further competition from foreign e-commerce businesses gunning for the Indonesian market in light of the upcoming ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) in 2015.

We will definitely keep you posted on the progress of this e-commerce regulation.

(Source: Kompas)

Today we received word from Indonesian startup Ticket Solutions that the company is now generating revenue of over IDR 4 billion ($400,000) every month using ticket booking platform Tiket’s API. This is definitely a great feat for a startup that only launched its first app last August.

Ticket Solutions’ Marcella Einsteins tells us that half of the revenue comes from the company’s flight ticket sales from Indonesia Flight, while the other half mostly comes from ticket sales for train and hotels. Ticket Solutions now has close to 500,000 users.

Marcella explains that the reason for the company’s fast growth is because they were able to help people book various on-demand tickets. She gives the example that a lot of people ordered tickets for a Super Junior concert with their Indonesia Events app; and then the startup’s app for booking train tickets also gained a huge boost because it was released before the annual Muslim holiday Lebaran where a lot of people travel back to their home.

Today the startup also revealed its iOS app for Indonesia Flight. Based on user demographic, Ticket Solutions believes that the potential income from iOS users can become even bigger than that from current users who are mostly on Android. Ticket Solutions is now developing Indonesia Flight for other platforms as well, like Windows Phone and S40.

Tiket’s open API has definitely brought some nice cash for its merchants. We understand that the company is targeting to achieve a break even point in October. Here are the screenshots of the new iOS app:

Rocket Internet’s Asia-based food delivery startup Foodpanda has announced another major round of funding today. The new round is worth more than US$20 million with investment from Sweden’s AB Kinnevik, Russia’s Phenomen Ventures, and several other unnamed investors.

Foodpanda takes orders online from over 5,000 partner restaurants in nine Asian countries and employs 150 staff. It was launched in April 2012. The new funding will be used “to further accelerate growth and optimize customer service,” according to Rocket Internet’s Ralf Wenzel in today’s announcement.

Co-founder at Foodpanda, Kiren Tanna

Foodpanda co-founder Kiren Tanna recently told us that growth has been especially great for Pakistan, India, and Indonesia.

The food delivery startup is run in conjunction with the similar Hellofood, so that the two services collectively cover some cities in 27 nations.

There’s plenty of competition in this sector in Asia for Foodpanda. Hungry netizens can make use of HungryDelivery and Dealivery in Singapore, and there are four strong homegrown rivals in Vietnam’s major cities.

China’s Jingdong (formerly called 360Buy) is expanding yet again from its original Amazon-style offerings, this time adding a supermarket channel (see here) to its e-commerce site. The addition brings more than 5,000 types of groceries, packaged foods, beverages, and snacks.

This move is a direct challenge to Yihaodian, the country’s largest food-only specialist e-store, which is majority owned by American retailer Walmart. Like Yihaodian, Jingdong ships its foodstuffs direct from its own warehouses. In contrast, Jingdong’s main rival, Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao sites, serve as intermediaries for food retailers, and those stores then dispatch the items to online buyers.

Jingdong says that shoppers can buy a single item if they wish, and there’s no obligation to buy a huge virtual basket of groceries. Aside from some common food staples, Jingdong’s new supermarket stocks some interesting imported items that most regular brick-and-mortar stores wouldn’t have, such as Spanish olive oil, or dried mangoes from the Philippines.

Jingdong switched to its current branding in March. The company’s latest funding round in February this year raised $700 million.

First of all, Ma clearly recognizes that some observers have been a little nervous about the e-commerce company’s step in to social media. After all, nobody wants to see Weibo turned into a glorified advertising platform, and Ma knows that. On the topic of how the services will be separated, he said:

If we turned Weibo into an e-commerce platform, we would be condemned by its users and also condemned by history [...] We’re now 18 percent shareholders in Sina Weibo, so if Weibo is doing well that’s good for us. We want Weibo to do well before we discuss what it can give Alibaba. Weibo is Sina’s thing, but if [Sina] needs us to do something, we will support them. That’s the only way this cooperation can continue.

Alibaba didn’t invest in Weibo for no reason. “The investment in Weibo is an important step in Alibaba’s future development,” said Ma. He didn’t name any specific reasons; we can think of a few.

But at the same time, Ma seems to suggest that the investment is also designed to help what he sees as a valuable service that might be in trouble. He says Weibo has increased transparency in Chinese society, and that Alibaba wants to help it be healthier and more successful. It’s no secret that Sina has struggled to monetize Weibo effectively, and although Ma never suggests that Alibaba is the white knight swooping in to rescue a damsel in distress, it sometimes feels a little like that’s what happened.

Everyone — Jack Ma included — agrees that Sina Weibo has really changed China’s society (mostly for the better), and everyone knows it faces a threat in WeChat. Users likely would never have guessed that a partnership with Alibaba might be the thing that really lets Weibo flourish, but that could prove to be the case. In ten years, we may well believe that Jack Ma saved Weibo with the Alibaba investment, allowing the service to continue changing Chinese society.

(via Sina Tech)

Today, with e-commerce sites on the inevitable, aggressive rise in Vietnam, food delivery has been a bit forgotten, so let’s get a lens on the top four food delivery sites in Vietnam. Later, we’ll be interviewing every one of these sites and looking at their growth and models, but for today, let’s just take a close look at the stats. Of course, each competitor wasn’t willing to share all their numbers, but we could glean a few things.

1. Vietnammm

The first one to hit the market by just a few months in February 2011. The site has over 400 restaurants and counting, and processes over 20,000 orders per month. According to Jochem Lisser, CEO of Vietnammm, Iin the beginning, it was mostly foreigners, but now Vietnamese users are beginning to make a serious share of the orders.” Vietnammm started here in Ho Chi Minh city but also operates in Hanoi and Danang, Vietnam’s major northern and central cities. Vietnammm has a significant market lead in Ho Chi Minh city.

2. Eat.vn

Just months after Vietnammm was launched, Eat.vn also made it onto the scene. Eat.vn currently has 500 restaurant partners. The total sales across Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city today are “a few billion VND (about US$100,000) every month” according to Anders Palm, the original founder of Eat.vn. Eat.vn was acquired by VC Corp last year. Eat.vn was also an early market leader in Hanoi, after seeing Vietnammm’s early rise in Ho Chi Minh city.

3. HungryPanda

A newcomer to the market, and backed by Rocket Internet, it has had a startlingly fast start in the country with 800 total restaurants and soon to be launching a mobile app. The site has only been in Vietnam for about a year and is pretty strongly focused on Vietnamese customers since 70 percent of its customers are locals. It’ll be interesting to watch HungryPanda compete with Eat.vn and Vietnammm.

4. Goimon.vn

The only non-foreign competitor in this list is Goimon.vn, which launched in November 2011. Currently Goimon.vn only has 150 restaurants as part of its coverage, but unlike the others it allows individuals like you or me to sell our favorite dishes via the platform. Currently, the site gets up to 1,000 to 5,000 unique visits per day and competes almost exclusively in the Vietnamese space.

Final Thoughts

So we can see that Eat.vn and Vietnammm, which were both started by expats living in Vietnam, first started with the overseas crowd, whereas HungryPanda, which is a foreign competitor with significant execution and financial backing and Goimon.vn, a Vietnamese competitor, are both going for the local Vietnamese market. But the key is, everybody is now looking more and more towards this country’s market, which has the ability to scale – whereas foreign consumers living in Vietnam are a relatively small market (liberally estimated to be under 200,000 nationwide).

The Vietnamese growth area makes sense to me, since Eat.vn and Vietnammm have a very secure market in the foreign market, it will be hard for HungryPanda to tackle their sector. The Vietnamese market is also huge.

I reached out to Hotmeal.vn, which is also founded by Vietnamese people, but the team did not respond. Its market share is also relatively small so it’s not clear if they will be able to compete with the big and incumbent players listed here.

We know that Tencent (HKG:0700) is working on a social gaming platform for WeChat, its popular social messaging app, but what else is in the pipeline? According to industry analyst Guan Peng, the next major version of WeChat app, which will be v5.0 for iPhone and Android, will come with support for three major new features.

Anticipating that WeChat v5.0 will appear later this month, he reckons we’ll see:

• Paid publishing or subscriptions for accounts on the WeChat public platform – ie: those run by celebrities, media outlets, and brands.

• Mobile payments with users able to scan QR codes to make payments within WeChat.

• Social gaming integration will arrive as promised.

In addition to all that, Guan Peng expects the WeChat brand/celebrity accounts to be given more emphasis and prominence.

Of course, none of that is officially coming in WeChat v5.0. We know there is a social gaming platform coming for sure – similar to those from rival apps Line and Kakaotalk – but it might not be ready to go live this month. E-payments are far from a certainty as well; indeed, when we listened in on Tencent’s most recent earnings call in March – revealing $7 billion in revenue in 2012 – Tencent president Marin Lau had this to say of mobile payments:

We take a long-term view – there are so many hurdles and a lack of standardization [for payments]. So it’s an experiment that we take a lot of interest in, but it takes a long time to see what needs to be done to build a business model on it.

As for paid publishing or subscriptions for content, that’s also an area covered by Line and KakaoTalk. Just a few weeks ago, KakaoTalk rolled out its KakaoPage platform for selling digital content, while Line recently started selling e-books. Neither of those will impact WeChat in China, we suspect, where most of its users actually are, but it’s interesting to see these similar patterns.

It’s conceivable that WeChat will pursue many other channels in the future as well, such as a rumored mobile wallet capability.

My own feature request for WeChat is a badly needed makeover – especially for its slow and clunky Android app with its dated, pre-Android 4.0 stylings.

(Source: Techweb – article in Chinese)

Of course, handling a billion RMB in transactions doesn’t mean the company sees nearly that much in profits or even revenue. But it does indicate that as the daily deals market continues to consolidate, Meituan is gaining ground rather than losing it. That’s important, given that founder Wang Xing has set his sights on breaking the hundred billion mark in yearly transactions by the year 2015.

(via Sina Tech)

In Vietnam, COD is huge. What do you think of Vietnam’s cash economy, and where does online payment factor into that?

Binh: In my opinion, beating COD in the near future is not realistic as you cannot build Rome in one night – especially as it means educating mass habits. NganLuong however cooperates and hence co-exists with COD by a strategic partnership with ShipChung.vn, the first and only shipping gateway in Vietnam that connects to leading shipping companies and then – through an open API – lets every e-commerce website automate shipping fee calculation, shipping orders, and COD processes. In this partnership, NganLuong serves as an online bank that helps ShipChung in settlement of seller’s cash into their eWallet account, so the whole COD payment volume still goes through us. By this way we do not compete but utilize COD to grow e-commerce in a strong and united ecosystem, NganLuong has become the first and only online payment platform that supports cash.

In the future, where is online payment headed in Vietnam?

Binh: I believe online payment in Vietnam will stay at the intersection of the three strategic markets which are: e-commerce payment, which will be worth billions in the future, digital goods payment, which will be worth $1 billion in 2015 according to VINASA, and mobile payment, which is a growing trend.

In the beginning, how did you grow NganLuong, especially in 2008 when you started it up? It must have been difficult with such a nascent market, right?

Binh: As we needed payment/escrow function for our e-commerce sites and there were no one that could meet our requirements, so we became impatient and I decided to develop our own solution, both for ourselves and other e-commerce sites. It was important that we were the first to support offline payment channels like bank transfer, ATM, escrow that other players didn’t have. My tactic at that time was: we have very limited funding, we cannot compete by cash with other players, and also we need to take control of our own platform, so why don’t we develop a very simple version first. It was about lean startup – learn and change. And then we introduced better versions later, as timing is very important. From 2008 until now, there have been many models that have risen and fallen alongside NganLuong, many of them have spent millions of dollars on models that haven’t worked. So there’s something to Binh’s method.

What were the key factors that allowed you to be successful where others failed?

Binh: PeaceSoft group’s experience from many Internet-related portfolios (over 12 with an above 80 percent success rate) has so far has shown that money (aka: investment) is not necessary. The most important things are:

1. Understanding the market and nature behind every action that you take.
2. Having your own unique innovation to differentiate – not copycat blindly.
3. Bootstrapping your costs.
4. Executing in the most optimized way.

These points are absolutely crucial for surviving in the Vietnamese market.

There are some interesting lessons here for folks interested in getting involved with e-commerce and payment in Vietnam. Basically, instead of working to destroy COD, NganLuong incorporated it into a delivery system. This is probably one reason why GHN, which specializes in delivery and cash-on-demand payment, is one of the more promising startups in Vietnam. NganLuong’s current innovations won’t stop there. Binh says they will try to stay on top of this by introducing two new payment methods later this year. Binh also cites that NganLuong was able to leverage the power of the e-commerce ecosystem that was already available via Peacesoft, and this was key to the success of NganLuong. This is an important factor for doing business in Vietnam where much of a success is built on top of relationships and leveraging ecosystems. With access to customers via eBay.vn, ChoDienTu.vn and his other properties, he could push users onto the payment platform.

Basically, Hashiji is a curated directory of products (mostly clothing) that are actually sold on other e-commerce platforms like Taobao. But in addition to the curation aspect, it offers users a much more pleasant shopping experience. No advertisements are shoved in your face, the site is attractive, quick, and intuitive, and it makes good use of comments to give you feedback about a product you might be interested in. When you mouse over a new product, for example, a comment snippet will slide gracefully up from the bottom, quickly giving you an idea of what people are saying about the product in question (pictured below).

On the bottom bar of the site, the founders have written a brief explanation of why they created Hashiji in 2012:

We wanted to make a simple thing, that allowed you to see the item and the comments clearly before you make a purchase, and then if you like it you can go buy it [on another site].

That’s a pretty good summary of what the site offers, and it does it very well. Perhaps the next time I’m looking for something on Taobao, I’ll start with Hashiji. Sure, I’m going to end up on Taobao one way or another eventually. But Hashiji looks, and frankly feels, better. That may be a simple thing, but it’s enough to make you wonder why Taobao and other e-commerce platforms don’t look and feel this nice.

At present, the ads don’t seem to be very targeted. For example, the ads pictured above, on my own personal weibo feed, were exclusively for women’s clothing items (which, as a man, I don’t have much use for). So it certainly seems as though, at least for the moment, Alibaba probably hasn’t started thoroughly mining Weibo’s mountain of data yet. But we’re confident that it will, and Weibo users should get ready to start seeing more carefully targeted ads as time goes by.

In the meantime, it will be interesting to see if these new ad placements have any effect on Taobao’s sales numbers.

[Update: Andi has written the English version of his blog. You can see it here.]

The demise of e-commerce site Multiply in both Indonesia and the Philippines is one of the biggest shocks of the year so far. We’ve written our thoughts about it, as have others. One blog post that I found interesting is this one by Ideosource founder Andi S. Boediman yesterday. The original is written in Indonesian; we’ve received permission from Andi to paraphrase it in English here.

Andi starts by talking about the e-commerce scene in Indonesia. He says that it is looking very good right now. In 2012, the internet users here has passed the 60 million mark, and five percent of them – around three million people – have bought something online. This figure is outside the purchases made for airlines, hotels, and concerts. And the future looks bright as the internet adoption rate, as well as the online transactions, will increase significantly in the next five years.

According to Andi, the decision to close Multiply came not from a lack of e-commerce growth, but from a strategic perspective of investment. He echoed our own explanation of Multiply’s business model as part of the problem, pointing out that Multiply’s shipping subsidies cost the company a lot of money.

Basically, Multiply wasn’t making much money and it was going to take a long time for it to reach a desired level of profitability. Even if Multiply’s persistence had come to fruition, it would have been easy for rivals like Tokobagus to simply copy the company’s business model at that point. Tokobagus is doing quite well anyway though, and it seems that it is investor MIH’s main e-commerce asset in Indonesia.

Multiply Helped Indonesia’s E-commerce Industry Grow

Multiply’s demise may not be a bad thing. In fact, Andi believes that it can benefit the e-commerce industry in Indonesia. Multiply’s downfall means that a lot of its high quality human resources will suddenly disperse to the other e-commerce businesses and they will share their knowledge and experience in running the business.

Andi recalls his own experience when he departed e-commerce site Plasa.com. The founding group that he gathered have now become leaders in various internet and e-commerce companies. The same thing happened when social network Koprol was disbanded and when news site Detik got acquired too. The industry grows more quickly when company breakups speed the proliferation of high-quality talents.

These high-quality human resources now have the option to either work at another company or start their own e-commerce startups. Either way, that’s a good thing for Indonesia’s e-commerce market.

(Source: Andisboediman.blogspot.com)

Now that we know it finally has happened, the next immediate question is why. It’s not hard to figure out why Sina went for this deal; the company has been having trouble monetizing Weibo and having an extra $586 million in the bank certainly (to put it lightly) helps. But what’s Alibaba up to here?

As my colleague Steven pointed out in his article yesterday, it’s clear that Alibaba has been interested in becoming more social for some time, as evidenced in (for example) its apparent investment in chat app Momo and its acquisition of music service Xiami. OK, so Alibaba invested in Weibo because it wants to get more social. Why?

Getting Customers Where They Spend The Most Time

The most obvious answer is that that’s where all the customers are. Weibo has over 300 million registered users, and while only around 50 million of them are daily active users, my guess is that Alibaba is less concerned with how many users there are — everyone in China who’s on the internet already knows about Taobao anyway — and more about how users are spending their time, and how much time is being spent on Weibo.

Alibaba’s e-commerce sites, after all, aren’t really fun places to “hang out.” But people hang out on Weibo all the time. It seems likely Alibaba is looking not so much to increase its userbase as it is to increase the amount of time users spend with products from Alibaba platforms in front of their faces. After all, many people go on Taobao only when they need something, but 50 million people go on Weibo every day to discuss the news, follow their friends, etc. Putting products there should help give Alibaba better access to the impulse buy than it currently has, simply because people do not generally load an Alibaba site unless they’re already planning to buy something. Alibaba, I suspect, is hoping that Weibo will help it snag users who had no plans to buy anything but fell in love with a product they ran across while browsing Weibo (or chatting or listening to music on the other platforms the company has invested in thus far).

And of course, it has already been demonstrated that people will buy things from Weibo. The Xiaomi Weibo sale, with over a million phones sold via Weibo in just five minutes, must have impressed on Alibaba’s leadership that Weibo users will fork over their cash via that platform when given a product they’re actually interested in. And if there’s one thing Alibaba has a lot of, it’s products.

Access to a Goldmine of Data

Of course, the other side of the coin is that Weibo’s massive databases can also probably provide Alibaba with tons of useful information about consumer behaviors, desires, and trends that it can use to optimize marketing and maximize sales. We know the folks at Alibaba like data, and Weibo has literally billions of public posts that can serve as useful data points on everything from sentiments about a particular brand or product to general insight into the thoughts and desires of particular demographics. And with full integration into Weibo, Alibaba platforms’ marketing could be tweaked to respond automatically and in real time to new trends as they emerged.

Think, for example, about Beijing’s “Airpocalypse” earlier this year. Now imagine that for Beijing-based users, next to every Weibo post about the pollution there’s an ad for an air filter or a mask on Taobao. That, I think, is why Alibaba is so interested in Weibo that it is willing to pay what many analysts feel is a pretty generous sum for an 18 percent stake.

Of course, there could be more to it than that. Or I could be missing the forest for the trees. We’re hoping to head more from Alibaba about its specific strategy here soon, but in the meantime, what do you think about Alibaba’s investment in Weibo?

China’s top e-commerce company has secured what could be the biggest web deal of the year in the country. Alibaba, which has been a lot more keen to venture into social media recently, has taken an 18 percent stake in Sina Weibo, the Twitter-like microblogging service run by Sina (NASDAQ:SINA).

Sina Weibo has over 500 million registered users, and has been China’s most talked about social network in the past couple of years. Despite all that enthusiasm, only 46.3 million are daily active users of Weibo, and the service has been a headache for Sina in terms of real-time censorship and great difficulty in monetizing it.

Alibaba’s stake in Sina Weibo comes with an option to increase that, notes the New York Times’ Dealbook blog, to 30 percent in the future. The deal also involves cooperation between these two Chinese web giants that will fuse social media and e-commerce. Sina and Alibaba expect such projects to bring in about $380 million in revenue from Weibo in the next three years.

What forms could such social commerce take? Last year, the startup phone-maker Xiaomi made use of Sina Weibo to sell some of its phones. This little experiment – it was not a long-term sales channel – yielded amazing results, with 1.3 million reservations for the phones made in just five minutes. We’ll likely see Sina Weibo do more like that – but on a more permanent basis, and with Alibaba’s consumer-oriented e-commerce sites, Taobao and Tmall.

Alibaba has invested in a few social media startups in the past few months, such as a funding round put into a flirting app, and the acquisition of one music streaming site.

In a statement this evening, Alibaba founder and chairman Jack Ma said:

We believe that the cooperation of our two robust platforms will bring unique and valuable services to Weibo users, as well as making the mobile internet a core part of Alibaba’s strategy.

Tokobagus founders Arnold Sebastian Egg and Remco Lupker left the company back in August last year. But Arnold and Remco will be happy to hear that their online classified listings site continues to grow under the management of Michal Klar.

Each month, Michal says that “well over 10 million Indonesians” are recorded visiting Tokobagus with a total of 1.8 million ads now active on the site. Tokobagus continues to grow but Michal remains tight-lipped about Tokobagus’ key stats. Tokobagus continues to spend heavily on both online and offline advertising. If you are in Indonesia, it’s likely that you will see a Tokobagus commercial on TV (see an example below), and even in places like elevators.

Most online business people will be skeptical about the conversion rate of offline ads to online users. Since Tokobagus has been doing it consistently for such a long time, the efforts much have somehow paid off. Michal confirmed that traditional advertising proved to be effective and measuring its impact is highly complicated. When asked how much Tokobagus is spending on advertising, Michal says it will be the last number that he will ever share.

With MIH as its latest backer, the site isn’t at all focused on being a profitable venture yet. When talking about revenue, Michal is confident that ads and premium listings for sellers are the right paths to generate revenue. Case in point: Craigslist, the world’s largest online classifieds site, makes more than $100 million each year. A fast growing Russian classified site, Avito, recorded 40 million monthly unique visitors generating over $30 million revenue in 2012.

Tokobagus currently has just over 100 employees in its newly furnished office, with one-third each working on IT, marketing, and quality control.

Made in Malaysia, Instapps helps merchants to set up an online storefront within their Facebook page. Instapps allows merchants to easily manage their product listings and sales.

Once published, the Instapps store appears as a tab on the Facebook page and merchants are able to manage their inventories all within the Instapps management system. The service remains free for merchants for up to eight products. Anything above that, Instapps charges from $9 per month. The idea is very similar to Indonesia’s Onigi which has had more than 14,000 users since June last year.

Instapps was started within Tribeup, a digital marketing agency based in Penang, Malaysia. The first version of Instapps helps users build Facebook landing pages, like Pagemodo does. But the team scrapped the idea after two weeks and it eventually became a Facebook commerce (sometimes dubbed f-commerce) solution application. The team has received angel investment to help Instapps get started.

Despite so much expectation that social commerce will take off, it doesn’t seem to be a widespread reality yet. I think this GigaOM article does a good job of explaining why it hasn’t been a success – and also why it could be a success in the future.

Friday’s news about e-commerce site Multiply closing down is a shocker. No one could’ve predicted this. Just last December we met up with CEO Stefan Magdalinski and Indonesia country manager Daniel Tumiwa, and they were enthusiastically talking about the future. Everyone was geared towards 2013.

A lot of people in Indonesia’s startup scene are also in shock. They told me how they’ve just met with the Multiply’s higher-ups and discussed about the company’s plans and new features to be launched. It seems even the people inside Multiply are in shock as much as we are. Why on earth did this happen?

Multiply’s transitional setback might be one of the main reasons.

The chaotic transition

The e-commerce site officially rebranded last month, complete with a brand new logo. But the transition was not a smooth one. This comment made by one of the sellers explains how difficult it is to sell products under the new system:

• The site only shows some of her product listings since the transition. It is most probably an error.
• After a buyer orders lipstick, there is no information about which color she ordered.
• It is quite difficult for the seller to contact her buyer. The new site no longer has comments or a private message feature. She can only send an email to her buyer.

That comment was made on April 5th, around two weeks after the new site launched. There was also the issue of sellers not receiving their money from the sales made on Multiply. That case has apparently been solved by the company, but a few people have lost faith in Multiply as a lot of their phone calls and emails went unanswered even after the incident.

It also seems some sellers’ conversation history with their buyers went totally bust. This comment made by one of the sellers says that she has built her contacts for over three years, and now it is all gone. She also added that her whole product listings on Multiply, which were listed on Google’s first page, is now gone.

On a personal note, even Multiply’s terms and conditions page now looks very confusing. The page mixes both Indonesian and English, and it doesn’t make Multiply look like a company that has control of its operations.

Two months ago, Multiply was ranked 17th in the Philippines and 47th in Indonesia. At the time of this writing, the company is now ranked at 50th in the Philippines and 344th in Indonesia.

Very high burn rate

Credit: wondergressive.com

Of course, in the end it will always be about money. Besides lots of money to fix the whole fiasco described above, Multiply would also need time to reclaim the long-built reputation and faith from its sellers and buyers alike. That’s a huge setback for sure.

According to an unnamed source, Multiply is the number one e-commerce site for one of Indonesia’s largest bank BCA. In fact, the revenue Multiply records is twice as much as the second placed BCA e-commerce partner. That means Multiply is recording very huge transactions over the past years, but because of Multiply’s business model it also means that the company is burning huge amount of money too.

Multiply doesn’t take any transaction fees from its sellers. This was originally done by previous CEO Peter Pezaris as Multiply’s promotional program for its brand new e-commerce service in 2011. But since then, it has been extended up until today. So Multiply hasn’t taken any transaction fees from its sellers in the last one and a half year.

That is more or less similar to what rival Tokopedia does, but Multiply offers something more. The latter site offers delivery fee subsidy of IDR 25,000 (US$2.5) for every IDR 100,000 ($10.3) minimum transaction on selected items. A lot of popular items get this offer, and that would mean that Multiply is burning a lot of money in subsidizing these delivery offers to a lot of its users. Thus the higher the transaction, the higher the cost for Multiply. Just like the free transaction fee, this subsidy offer has been in effect since 2011.

Refocusing efforts

According to the explanation given by Stefan, Multiply shareholder MIH remains optimistic about the e-commerce industry in Indonesia and the Philippines, and has increased its funding to other portfolio companies TokoBagus and Sulit.com.ph. That “increased funding” could mean MIH’s strategy changed to focus its funds on more promising companies. Perhaps MIH has decided that backing up Multiply was no longer worth the effort.

The cost to propel Multiply into the kind of company it was before the shutdown was quite high. Rebuilding its reputation and spending more of that money may no longer be the logical option. Rather than patching up your weaknesses, you might be better off putting that effort into your strengths. For MIH in this case, its strengths are TokoBagus (ranked 14th in Indonesia) and Sulit (ranked 8th in the Philippines).

A lot of Multiply users are also quite shocked and sad about this. Just last month we saw more blood shed by Japan’s e-commerce company Rakuten in its joint venture project in Indonesia.

Besides those two companies, we’ve also recently seen two popular Indonesian startups Koprol and Saling Silang raising white flags too. Could these be just the start of natural selection setting its course here in Indonesia? What do you think?

We’ve received news from several readers that social network turned e-commerce marketplace Multiply is shutting down.

According to an email sent to Multiply merchants (see below), the site will be online till May 6, and will discontinue all operations on May 31. With further searching, you will find announcements on its Southeast Asia/Philippines and Indonesian sites.

Multiply’s merchants are advised to move to a new e-commerce marketplace. In Indonesia, there’s no shortage of choice of marketplaces, including Tokobagus, Kaskus, and Tokopedia. The news comes as a huge surprise as many would have thought Multiply is growing pretty well.

It was just last year that Multiply said it will discontinue its blog operations, move its headquarters to Jakarta, Indonesia, and move full force into e-commerce. Back then Multiply also revealed that it had 100,000 Indonesian sellers and around 75,000 Filipino sellers.

We’ve contacted Multiply’s country managers in the Philippines and Indonesia and will update if we hear from them. Here’s the letter sent out to merchants today:

Dear Multiply Merchant,

We regret to inform you that Multiply will be closing the marketplace on May 6, 2013 and discontinuing all business operations by May 31, 2013.

Multiply will maintain normal site operations through May 6th and will wind things down through to the end of the month. We will use the rest of May to make sure that all accounts are settled and that you receive all funds you earned on the platform. We hope this provides you time needed to identify and migrate to alternative ecommerce platforms, settle all payments on items bought and delivered, and try to minimize disruption to your business.

In order to ensure that all your earnings are disbursed to you in full prior to May 31, we will cut off buying activity on May 6, 2013. This will ensure that all orders have sufficient time to be completed and delivered to your customers before the end of the month.

If you have a Trust Badge, please contact our customer support team and we will ensure that you receive a pro-rated refund for the remaining time on your subscription.

If my team can be of any assistance to you during this transition, we will do our best to help.

Indonesian design crowdsourcing marketplace Sribu ¹ is revealing a few interesting stats about its progress, including the recent milestone of attracting over 25,000 designers onto its platform.

All those 25,000 designers have produced over 135,000 designs for Sribu’s clients. The company so far has had more than 500 clients. According to my math, that means that each client gets an average of 270 designs. Furthermore, Sribu is also proud to announce that the company has paid out a cool US$100,000 to designers on the platform. So far it is looking quite good for the startup which only come into inception one and a half years ago.

Founder Ryan Gondokusumo explained to us about the startup’s plans to expand:

Our goal in the future is to penetrate deep into regional markets with the positioning as an online graphic design company that provides Asian flavour.

Sribu’s recent collaboration with Visa has definitely been geared towards that end. Ryan explained that he is going to upgrade and launch a few features which can help boost the company’s client acquisition plan. One of those features is an affiliate program. This is already available in beta form today, and it will be fully launched next month. Ryan says that Sribu is open for potential collaboration with suitable partners.

Earlier today fashion e-commerce site Zalora launched its iOS shopping app for users in Southeast Asia. On the same day, the company’s Indonesian branch also revealed to us some updates about its progress and upcoming plans.

Zalora Indonesia managing director Hadi Wenas says that the site’s traffic now reaches up to 200,000 visitors every day, which is a good increase on November’s 150,000 daily visits. 20 percent of those visits come from mobile devices, with the mobile purchasing conversion rate being less than half of that. Hadi hopes that the new app could boost the mobile conversion rate up to three times, and targets 10,000 app downloads within the next three days.

If you’re wondering when Zalora Indonesia will launch its Android app, the answer is next month. But Hadi says that the upcoming app is for Zalora Indonesia only. Its Blackberry app will come in the near future too. Hadi emphasizes that the company’s focus this year is on mobile. You might recall Zalora launched its mobile-specific site just a few months ago.

Zalora Indonesia has also been quite busy in between. Today the company announces its co-promotional effort with Indonesia’s largest telco, Telkomsel, by launching the Zalora Simpati Fashion Zone program. This entitles Simpati users to get discounts from Zalora, among other things. Hadi teased that by the end of May, they will have a cooperation with a large female community as well as have celebrities onboard to push sales even more.

The Rocket Internet portfolio company recently laid off 20 percent of its staff in Indonesia. The laid off people were given full severance packages, an additional one month salary, and recommendations to potential employers. Hadi explains that after going through the early days of trying out a lot of things at Zalora, now they understand better what needs to be done, and they need to be more efficient in doing so. This lead, he explains, to the lay-offs. The current team is 150 people.

So far it doesn’t look like money is a problem for Zalora. The fashion e-commerce company received US$26 million from German retail company Tengelmann Group last month.

For shopaholics and fans of Zalora, here’s a piece of news that will probably further strain your pockets. Zalora today officially launched its iOS app, and now you can shop for clothes or shoes even while on-the-go.

There are currently over 500 brands and 15,000 products listed on the new fashion e-store app. Users can receive push notifications on the new items and flash sales that Zalora has, and choose from multiple payment methods such as credit cards, PayPal, and cash-on-delivery. The user interface looks pretty and is optimized for the iPhone 5 too.

Unfortunately, the app is not available on Android yet, despite the growing number of Android users within the region. The reason for the initial push on the iOS platform, according to Zalora, is that most of its mobile shoppers are on the iOS platform. For countries with the highest mobile traffic, Zalora has twice as many shoppers on iOS than on Android.

But of course, Zalora is currently proposing to its Germany office to develop an Android app. Other platforms, such as BlackBerry or Windows, are not even in the pipeline yet.

To celebrate the launch, shoppers on the new Zalora app are entitled to a 20 percent discount using its in-app voucher code. According to Zalora, the app is currently the top lifestyle app in five countries, namely Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

If you’re keen to indulge in some shopping while waiting for that train or bus, you can give the app a try here.

The Rakuten Indonesia site.

Nikkei first broke the news last month that the joint venture between MNC and Rakuten (JSD:4755) is over in Indonesia. We reached out to both MNC and Rakuten but no one wanted to speak about the situation on the record. The e-commerce site Rakuten Belanja Online is still running, though who knows what’s going on behind the scenes with MNC and Rakuten. This morning Rakuten finally broke the silence, sending us an official statement from Toru Shimada, senior executive officer and head of Asia HQ, who said:

Two years ago, Rakuten launched Rakuten Belanja Online in Indonesia with our JV partner MNC Group. We are very pleased with the growth of the business, where today we offer the widest range of products from Indonesia’s top merchants, as well as the tremendous response we have seen from Indonesian merchants and consumers alike.

From the beginning, we recognized Indonesia’s potential to become one of the biggest e-commerce markets in Asia, and our confidence in the market has only increased in the last two years. With the launch of Rakuten’s regional headquarters in Singapore last year, we are now able to accelerate the growth of our businesses around the region and will be increasing our investment in this exciting market.

We believe that through deepened focus and investment, we’ll be well positioned to not only accelerate the value that our B2B2C model and e-commerce platform brings to both empowering merchants and consumers, but also help spur the evolution of the Indonesian e-commerce landscape.

It’s a pity it doesn’t explain exactly what happened between MNC and Rakuten. But at least we now know Rakuten will still continue to be in Indonesia.

Rakuten told the media that it will not be commenting further on this issue. But the company did say that more of its APAC plans will be shared at its Q2 2013 earnings conference call on May 9.

If you’re a Vietnamese mom and you need diapers, you need look no further than Taembe.vn. The new e-commerce site, quietly released two weeks ago, focuses very specifically on online sales of diapers.

The concept is so simple. But as we learned at Startup Asia earlier this month, sometimes the simplest ideas are the most successful. According to Tomo Huynh, Taembe.vn’s CTO:

You could say we focus on delivering diapers to doors, and if you’ve ever seen a woman carrying a pack of diapers on her bike, you’ll understand why.

Currently in this space there are two big competitors to Taembe.vn including Beyeu.com from IDG’s Project Lana, and Liulo – but both of these companies focus on general baby products whereas Taembe.vn focuses mainly on diapers (though it also sells other baby-related products).

The founding team’s made up of three main people including Tomo, who is also CTO at Alehap.vn, a local travel website; there’s Le Khac Ngan Ha, who previously worked at Vietnam Ventures Group and Brandsfavor.com, and Hien Doan, who used to work for Liulo. They all met at BarcampSaigon, one of the largest tech-related conferences in Ho Chi Minh city, and the three e-commerce aficionados saw an opportunity in this very specialist area. Ngan Ha is confident about the model:

Like Diapers.com, our focus will be on customer service. Customer service in Vietnam is still quite poor, so if we can provide superior customer service, we think we can become number 1 in a short amount of time.”

Taembe.vn already has sales. The company uses GHN for some deliveries but also has an in-house delivery team. Tomo says the startup is also “open to overseas investment from people who understand e-commerce in emerging markets.”

Disclosure: I am a friend of Tomo Huynh and also an organizer of BarcampSaigon. If you would like to read more on our code of ethics, you can find it here.

Between the 16th and 18th century, at the height of the age of sailing, there were few vessels as formidable, as revered, and as valued as the galleon. Capable of both wartime and trade duties, Spain in particular designed amazing galleons, capable of traversing the then treacherous expanses of the Pacific Ocean between Mexico and Manila. These 2,000-ton vessels were appropriately named Manila Galleons, and they were the trade lifeblood of the Kingdom of Spain.

Fast forward 300 or so years, and a different kind of galleon is attempting to make its mark in a very different kind of trade. It’s an e-commerce site that provides all the most niche products you can’t find anywhere else.

Way back in December of 2011, the original concept for what would become Galleon.ph was hatched by Jeffrey Siy, founder of group buying site Awesome.ph, and by Chris Blanquera, founder of Openovate.com. Galleon.ph itself would not be launched until July of 2012.

Jeffrey explains:

Galleon.ph is an e-commerce website which sells products that are not available locally. Think of Amazon.com but just items you can’t find in malls or local marketplace. On a business perspective though, we are basically a payment gateway, logistics, and customer support built into one. We don’t maintain any inventory at the moment given we are using a dropship model. The reason we are so successful in building our database is because we have access to our supplier’s database of products which is in the millions.

Indeed, one look at the Galleon website and you can tell this isn’t your average online buying site. As I mentioned recently, many local daily deal sites seem to have the very same deals, promos and packages, reshuffled and recycled on each site.

Galleon is all about exclusivity. How exclusive you ask? How about Native American ceremonial peace pipe exclusive? Or a Panda-themed chopsticks practice kit! Or maybe you’ve been searching high and low for a Boska Holland Raclette Quattro cheese cutter?! Whether there are actually people who’ll buy these things, there’s no denying you’d be hard pressed to find these items anywhere else.

Again, from Jeffrey:

The idea started late last quarter of last year when a friend of my partner at Awesome.ph called me up to see if I was interested in doing an e-commerce website. I said it was too broad of an idea so we had to refine it in order to offer something different. We sat down and tried to understand why people [Filipinos] shop in the US. We discovered two reasons: it was cheaper, including shipping and taxes, or we don’t have it here in the Philippines. We went for the latter one because it offered a more unique selling proposition plus it won’t hurt the existing licensed distributors here.

To start, you must register using your Facebook account. With that out of the way, you’re now free to browse Galleon’s extensive selection of exclusive products. You’ll notice however, that some products are not priced. This means that the item is listed, but not held in stock. This is by no means the end of the road though, as a price can be requested for you personally.

Once your cart is full, payments can be made via direct deposit through BDO (Banco De Oro), credit card, GCash, or Smart Money. Speaking of credit card payments, Galleon strays from the usual PayPal route and instead utilizes Asiapay. And because almost all of the products on offer are sourced from the US, expect delivery in 10 to 15 days for Metro Manila, plus three more days for provincial areas.

Jeffrey adds:

The greatest challenge for us is building the brand. Customers have a difficult time understanding the concept of Galleon.ph given that it’s not a traditional e-commerce website. Equally challenging is to change the perception of customers that transacting online is safe.

One minor detail to note is in the layout of the site itself. Though all items are illustrated, the label on some of the items can be a bit confusing, since the complete name of some products are not completely displayed. For example, I came across one item in particular, advertised as the POSRUS Wacom Intuos 5 Touch. I’ve actually always wanted to get one of these, but the regular price of PHP 18,300 (US$443.57) has always been discouraging. So to find it on Galleon for only PHP 1,458 (US$35.34) immediately made my heart pump. You can imagine my dismay when I opened its description page and found it was actually the POSRUS Wacom Intuos 5 Touch ‘Medium Pen Tablet Surface Cover’. Yes, just the cover. Maybe not a huge bug on the site, but it can be a bit of a letdown.

Jack Ma, chairman of Alibaba, at today’s anti-piracy event.

China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba is working with five Chinese government agencies to fight piracy in China. Founder and chairman Jack Ma was on hand at today’s event, warning Chinese brands that it’s in their long-term interest to respect intellectual property laws. Ma said:

This is a long-term effort … we want the indigenous brands to work together to protect IPR, because if you do not participate today, tomorrow you are the victims. Hopefully in 10 years, the Chinese internet economy will be a much better place because of the efforts we have started here today.

Polo Shao, chief risk officer at Alibaba Group, said today that “big data” technology and traditional law enforcement resources will make investigation and enforcement of China’s intellectual property laws more effective. Shao added:

On e-commerce platforms, every single transaction creates a record, and every piece of information about sellers of counterfeit products is traceable. Internet technology … when paired with offline efforts can be used to create targeted initiatives to drive intellectual property protection as well as cut off the head of the snake in an attempt to purge society of counterfeit goods.

Of Alibaba’s web properties, its C2C marketplace Taobao has been especially plagued with pirated goods. Former CEO Jack Ma even joked in a previous speaking appearance that piracy somewhat added a surprise element to shopping at Taobao. Putting jokes aside, Ma is serious about cracking down on pirated items in its marketplace with this partnership with the Chinese government. The company will even set up an in-house anti-piracy task-force to be headed by Polo Shao. Ma calls China’s common counterfeit branding a “cancer” and a “tumor in society.”

According to Alizila, Alibaba’s corporate blog, “more than allegedly 94 million infringing listings were removed from Alibaba Group platforms” last year and about “5.5 million of them were taken down as a result of complaints from rights owners.”

Taobao was removed from the US Trade Representative’s notorious pirate watch-list a few months ago, with the organization citing major IPR improvements on Alibaba’s various web properties. But the situation is far from solved – least of all on the company’s own e-commerce platforms.

Tackling piracy – both online and offline – should greatly help China repair her tainted reputation on the global stage.

One of my favorite local Vietnamese tech sites, Pandora.vn, just came out with an interesting report saying that in Vietnam e-books haven’t even hit one percent of the market.

Frankly, I’m not surprised. I had to go to Singapore to get my Kindle Paperwhite. Kindles in Vietnam are either sold out or nobody’s heard of them. For e-readers like Nook, they’re even harder to find. This is despite e-commerce companies like Tiki.vn promoting the sale of Kindles and companies like Alezaa promoting the use of e-books.

From 2010 to 2012, there have been some minor efforts from the Ministry of Education in digitizing textbooks and training materials. But companies like VTC and Go.vn, the government’s social network, have also created initiatives, but maintaining copyrights have been a big hurdle.

This is all in stark contrast to e-books in the US, where last year e-books took 22 percent of the total book spending. I think Vietnam specifically struggles with two things as far as e-books are concerned:

• There are just no e-readers around. In all the local electronics stores, they’re ridiculously hard to find. Merchants don’t think customers don’t want e-readers and customers aren’t buying them. Not to mention, tablets aren’t showing as much aggressive growth as smartphones are.
• Alezaa is one of the only platforms to distribute e-books – but it’s experiencing copyright issues, as are the other platforms. But the real issue is just like iTunes over Napster, this platform needs to be easier for people to buy, because some customers are always willing to pay.

Until these two things are solved, a kind of chicken and egg problem is occuring, e-books will continue to fail to gain traction. The Vietnamese e-book market needs to take a page out of the playbook of Ookbee, the startup e-bookstore from Thailand, and build a model that works for an increasingly mobile-oriented population.

A stylish newcomer: see the startup e-commerce list below.

The internet industry in Pakistan is currently at an extremely exciting point, and the outlook for local entrepreneurs and venture capitalists is strong in the mid to long run. Being the sixth largest country in the world in terms of population, Pakistan has an ever-expanding internet base which currently stands at 22 million users, with eight million now on Facebook.

With such a wide array of currently undeveloped markets to compete in, the need for online stores will only increase over the course of time. When one further considers the high cost of establishing a traditional brick-and-mortar store, one realizes the advantages online entrepreneurs are privy to.

The Internet industry dynamics have also changed quite dramatically in recent times with 2012 being a possible turning point for rapid growth. As a result of heavy investment in the arena by three major players – the largest courier company in Pakistan, a major retail outlet, and one of the largest venture builders globally – a string of competitors have started to emerge. More on those later.

Early days

Building internet businesses has traditionally not come easily to Pakistan. Our first e-commerce venture began in 2001 with the establishment of Beliscity.pk by Abid Beli. Although initially started as an information website for mobiles and computers, it soon turned into an e-commerce store as a result of its growing popularity.

You might then expect this venture to have turned out a success story, with Beliscity ending up being the equivalent to Amazon in Pakistan. Unfortunately this was not the case. Owing to many complications and troubles, not only was Beliscity forced to changed its name to Gulf Dealz, it also fell into obscurity competing with countless other players in the online retail arena.

3 hot e-commerce startups to look out for in Pakistan

Those, however, were just the early days and the environment seems much more conducive to starting e-commerce ventures now. 2012, I believe, will go on record as a landmark year for internet businesses in the nation. The year saw the launch of three very different and important companies taking off with their own e-commerce portals:

• TCS Connect is the online portal of TCS Couriers, Pakistan’s most reliable and wide-reaching logistics company. In May 2012, TCS launched its online shopping portal, TCS Connect, which has products like computers, mobile phones, home and kitchen appliances, and even automobile accessories.
• Labels eStore is the online store for Pakistan’s largest high-end fashion outlets. With its product lines covering the biggest fashion designers in Pakistan, it targets high-end consumers in the local market and the Pakistani diaspora across the world.
• Daraz.pk represents the fashion vertical of the global venture developers, Rocket Internet. The company did not enter into our local online market arena at the behest of Pakistani entrepreneurs who sought funding, but rather as a ‘top-down’ decision by Oliver Samwer to capture the developing Pakistani market in the long-term.

The establishment and subsequent success of these and other businesses have led to a greater focus on e-commerce sites. Whether they be other clothing brands expanding their businesses online, logistics companies either starting online stores themselves or providing tools and consultancy for brick-and-mortar retail owners to start a digital side to their existing businesses, or young entrepreneurs themselves wanting to get into this nascent business – whatever the case, online stores are here to stay in Pakistan and will only attain a larger customer base going forward.

The success of Rocket Internet’s Daraz has also made other venture capital firms take notice and start making initial contact with local players in the industry to fund entrepreneurs.

Future outlook, untapped space

With this hive of activity, the future for Pakistan’s e-commerce and internet industry has a positive outlook. Local entrepreneurs should seize this opportunity to capitalise on the open market space. The diagram below illustrates the vast amount of untouched market space, ready and waiting to be capitalized on. Being a strong first-mover will undoubtedly be an advantage for entrepreneurs and investors alike:

Disclosure: As mentioned above, Adam was one of the first employees of Daraz.pk and its former product manager for over six months. Please see our ethics statement for further information

MOL, one of the biggest payment companies in Southeast Asia, whose annual revenue is $300 million, is acquiring a 50 percent stake in NganLuong, one of Vietnam’s top online payments systems. Like Paypal, NganLuong works like a payment wallet solution which also includes other payment options like escrow, airtime, and credit card processing. But NganLuong does even more than that by allowing customers to deposit money into their NganLuong accounts via various sources including bank account, cash, post, ATM kiosk, and telco SMS before merchants withdraw the money.

NganLuong has been at the top of the online payment battle in Vietnam for a while now. It’s connected to over 10,000 merchants, three leading mobile operators, and 24 banks in Vietnam, meaning that it has one of the largest reach over the Vietnamese payment market.

Payment in Vietnam has been slow to take off mainly because cash-on-demand remains the most convenient and de facto payment method for merchants and consumers. Credit cards are nowhere. So it’s hard to tell when or how online payment will really take off in Vietnam. MOL investing in NganLuong could provide the necessary capital for the two companies to market and educate the market in online payments. MOL is also heavily interestedin gaming, and Vietnam is a huge gaming market. At this point, NganLuong is one Vietnam’s best bets (there’s also Payoo but it hasn’t gained much traction as yet and the website is ugly) at making online payment ubiquitous. If it’s successful, many markets would open up for Vietnamese startups in online education, e-commerce, content, and mobile apps.

That’s the third major acquisition of a well-known domestic startup in Vietnam this year. In February, CareerBuilder acquired VON, and earlier this month En-Japan acquired Vietnamworks. Suffice to say, Vietnam’s online space is hot. Companies want to get in early and secure market share before it explodes.

NganLuong is the online payments unit of Peacesoft, which has a variety of domains across the e-commerce space including:

• Chodientu.vn: the leading B2B2C domestic marketplace coordinated with eBay.
• Ebay.vn: a C2C and B2C platform.
• Prostore: an online retail solution for small to medium-sized enterprises.
• ShipChung.vn: a cash-on-delivery delivery website.
• NaiMa.vn: a luxury fashion e-store.
• AdNet.vn: an open affiliate advertising platform.
• SaoBang.vn: a classified-ads portal.

Thus, NganLuong has a particularly far reach across the online landscape of Vietnam and will allow MOL to spread its wings further in the huge yet difficult market of Vietnam’s over 30 million internet users.

We’ll be grabbing an interview with NganLuong’s founder and CEO, Nguyen Hoa Binh, later this week, so we’ll be sure to ask for details on MOL’s stake and plans.

In Vietnam, we’ve got lots of homegrown daily deals and e-commerce sites, as well as a few foreign companies like Rocket Internet and China’s Vancl entering the fray. So it’s pretty hard to find unique models like Shopby in the mix.

Shopby, which is basically a social commerce site directed at daily deals based in Hanoi, Vietnam, beta-launched in April 2012, and fully launched in December 2012. It’s a team of nine people. With currently over 11,000 users and approximately 500 to 5,000 visits per day, depending on deals and timing. It has 30 deals at a time and each lasts anywhere from one day to a month, mostly focused on fashion and food and beverage. The website is actually a pet project of SmartOSC, whose main business is building projects with Magento, an e-commerce platform. E-commerce is in their blood.

The idea of social commerce as used by Shopby, according to CEO Hieu Nguyen, is as he says:

A central place to bring people together who are buying the same things. People can make purchases based on interests of others on their social graph. Usually, customers make a decision to buy an item based on recommendations and interests from the people most relevant to them.

Outside of the social graph side of things, Shopby also allows users to follow shops they like and, of course, follow friends. Users can create their own new account, but mainly they use Facebook to login.

Shopby does have some competitors in the space, including Zaia.vn and Guu.vn but they don’t exactly approach it from the same social perspective. With Shopby, businesses and users can upload their own deals directly onto the site – these deals are only displayed if they are relevant to users in their social circle. Businesses can check statistics on user behavior and reaction to their deals. Looking to the future, Hieu says:

Currently, we’re in phase one where users can post deals they like. But in phase two, we’ll allow users to request deals. Thus requesting discounts on certain items in a shop. Phase two will come out in June.

At the moment, Shopby is in its growth phase so revenue is nil. In the future, Hieu is looking to grow it into a marketing platform, charging businesses for listings – and there’s a current stealth model for phase two of the company.

Foodpanda co-founder Kiren Tanna

Rocket Internet’s online food delivery website, Foodpanda, was launched last year in April and has since undergone rapid expansion. Today, Rocket Internet’s FoodPanda is in eight Asian countries supported by 150 staff. Foodpanda, combined with Hellofood which is a food delivery site targeted at non-Asian markets, is serving over 10,000 restaurants. Foodpanda alone has around 5,000 restaurants.

Foodpanda co-founder Kiren Tanna (pictured), claims that all nine markets are growing and growth has been especially great for Pakistan, India, and Indonesia. In India, Foodpanda is working with over 2,000 restaurants. Interestingly, Kiren shared that India has a lot of orders from iPads over the weekend. For Pakistan, around 60 to 70 percent of the orders come from mobile. Singapore is a big dinner market while Indonesia and Taiwan prefer to order during lunch time.

Foodpanda works like this: customers go to the website and place orders online, then the restaurants will receive an order slip from Foodpanda’s GPRS box (or through SMS/email/fax), prepare the orders, and deliver them to the customers’ doorstep.

Foodpanda GPRS box

In places like Indonesia where food orders can be done by text or phone without the need of such a platform, I asked how Foodpanda differentiates itself. Kiren explained that the experience ordering food through the phone isn’t ideal. There’s a higher rate of errors when communicating information on the phone. Plus, expats who don’t speak the local language wouldn’t be able to place an order. With Foodpanda, it remembers customers’ delivery information when they next place an order, minimizes errors in communication since information is digitized, and ensures the most updated menus and prices available.

Although food orders are mostly done online, Foodpanda occasionally accepts phone orders to help new users get started. In such cases, the login details are sent to first time users together with discount perks to encourage them to order online in the future.

When asked about how Foodpanda selects restaurants to work with, Kiren told me:

We find the [restaurant] leads based on what we see [online], for example, HungryGoWhere. When we signed up a restaurant, we asked them questions like how many deliveries do you do? Are you ready for weekend peak capacity?

Foodpanda also orders from new restaurants to ensure that the food delivery experience is good and the food is in a good state when they are delivered. Orders from Foodpanda, though great, can be stressful for restaurants. Kiren shared that there are cases whereby a company flooded one store by ordering 200 sandwiches and another ordered 120 lunch boxes!

Moving forward, Foodpanda is looking to integrate with the big restaurants’ points-of-sale (POS) to make the process from ordering to billing smoother. Foodpanda is also investing heavily in mobile as it sees “very good traction” and growing number of orders from mobile devices. Kiren added:

We’re looking at city expansion […] and we want to be the number one in emerging markets for delivery services.

In Asia, Foodpanda competes with Dealguru’s Room Service Deliveries which operates in Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia. There’s no way to investigate who is bigger since both sides aren’t willing to share any data.

The following is a compilation of just a few of the many daily deals sites that have popped up in the Philippines in recent years. As a metric, I’ve included the number of Facebook likes each site has tallied to date. Some are veterans in the e-commerce wars, others are relative newbies. Most are homegrown ventures, while a couple can trace their roots overseas.

Several of these sites are also categorized as group buying or collective buying sites, where a minimum number of buyers must buy into a deal or promo before it can be claimed. If this minimum number, or tipping point, is not met by the promo’s deadline period, it is cancelled and no charges are made. The rest are your standard daily deals sites.

MetroDeal Manila

Facebook likes: 628K

Recently covered here at Tech In Asia, MetroDeal as the number one shouldn’t come as a surprise. With 299 deals available (as of this writing) it’s a destination for bargain-hunters. This site gets over two million unique visitors per month.

Living Social (Ensogo)

Facebook Likes: 468,412

Originally created in Thailand in 2009, LivingSocial came to Manila in July of 2010. Featured products range from simple snacks at well known restaurants to fully packaged vacation deals. Registration is free and simple, and buying a deal nets you a voucher, which you can print and present to the featured merchant. You can also earn Ensogo credit by inviting friends to be members. These credits, which cost 1 peso for 1 credit, can then be used as good as cash to buy deals of your choice.

CashCashPinoy

Facebook Likes 342,183

Founded in 2010 after first-hand frustration in bargain hunting in the malls of Metro Manila, Cash Cash Pinoy features a lot of fashion products, gadgets, and travel packages. Delivery is free nationwide, and the site promotes fast, priority shipping, with hassle free returns. Payments can be made, as with most e-commerce sites, via credit card, PayPal, GCash, bank deposits, or even over the counter at a 7–11.

DealDozen

Facebook Likes: 129,621

At first glance, Deal Dozen (DD) appears to be a very high-class e-commerce site. Further browsing proves this, as DD clearly advertises itself as a lifestyle website as opposed to general e-commerce. You can tell a lot of attention to detail was placed on website design, perhaps in the hope that pleasing visuals would entice visitors to buy more. Aside from beauty and luxury products, there is also an abundance of enrollment programs for advanced education for younger children. DD also offers ‘buy and share’ deals wherein you get special incentives if you share certain deals with friends on Facebook.

Groupon Philippines

Facebook Likes: 105,120

Launched in November 2008 in the US and officially arriving in the Philippines in February 2011, Groupon is advertised as the fastest growing internet company in history, reaching US$1 billion in sales in only 17 months. It has also been featured on the cover of Forbes and TIME as one of the top 50 websites in 2010. The catch is that for every deal, a minimum number of people must sign up before 12 noon, otherwise the deal is cancelled. No charges are made at this point, though the deal is lost.

DealGrocer

Facebook Likes: 87,736

Similar to DealDozen, Deal Grocer (DG) aims for a more luxurious and lifestyle-oriented approach to daily deals. Fine dining, exotic vacation packages, beauty products, and treatment offers – these are plentiful at DG. Purchasing a deal nets you either an electronic coupon delivered to your email, or an actual gift voucher delivered to your address. Also, DG claims that its featured deals are exclusive to its site, not available elsewhere, not even directly from the merchant. One thing of note is that all prices are in US dollars, and are charged thus, so even payments over the counter at banks are at US$ rates.

Gupo

Facebook Likes: 76,438

The name Gupo is derived from the Filipino word ‘grupo’ for ‘group’, and that’s how they advertise their deals. Gupo is again a lifestyle-oriented site, with lots of special offers for vacation packages for groups, salon and spa packages for couples, eat-all-you-can offers from well-known fine dining establishments, even group packages for pet check-ups and consultations. Of note however, is that though the site is rich and vibrant, there is no FAQ anywhere to be found, no information about payment methods, redemption and deliveries, not even word of special deals or promos.

DealsDiBa

Facebook Likes: 45,741

DealsDiBa (DDB) is obviously based heavily on Groupon. Unlike Groupon, which deals in pretty much anything and everything under the sun, DDB again takes the high society route, offering an unbelievably large selection of beauty products, treatment plans, luxurious fine dining, and exotic destination vacation packages. But, take a look at the category list on the side and hit the gadget link: No Deal Available. Payments can be made through the usual channels, credit card, PayPal, over-the-counter. And like Groupon, each deal needs to meet a minimum number of buyers otherwise it’s cancelled and no charge is made.

LocalRoam

Facebook Likes: 27,887

Also recently covered by Tech In Asia, LocalRoam (LR) is a rather specific e-commerce site, or as they bill themselves, a Buying Co-op. Off the bat, LR states that they focus exclusively on four types of services: travel, wellness, basic lifestyle stuff, and education/events. One question though, where exactly are the offers? Though we featured LR recently, one look at their site can leave you scratching your head. There is one deal for travel, one deal for a spa treatment, and five for restaurant offers. That’s it. When your competition can field hundreds if not thousands of travel deals to varied locations, having just one on your site is a fail, no matter how great your deal may be.

DealAmigos

Facebook Likes: 27,166

DealAmigos (DA) comes off as a pretty standard e-commerce site. Free registration, the usual payment methods, the same voucher redemption format shared with other sites. Product deals are varied enough, from vacation plans to self-defence stun gun flashlights – but there just aren’t enough deals. Though they offer more than Local Roam, they don’t come anywhere near the amount of deals offered by sites like MetroDeal and LivingSocial.

DealsTent

Facebook Likes: 26,043

DealsTent appears to be another lifestyle e-commerce site, though on a smaller scale than previous ones, and it shows. DealsTent shares the now common credit card/voucher for payment/redemption model, and offers mostly beauty products & treatments and vacation packages, with a few lifestyle gadgets thrown in for good measure. Ultimately however, there are very few, if any, exclusive deals in place, and definitely not enough deals as a whole, especially when compared to other lifestyle oriented e-commerce sites.

DealSpot

Facebook Likes: 25,084

DealSpot is based in Greenhills, San Juan City – arguably ‘deal Mecca’ in Metro Manila. It’s also a group buying site, like Groupon and DealsDiBa. The format is similar as well, buy a deal, get a voucher for later redemption, wait for the deals timer to expire. If enough buyers have taken the bite, the deal is on, just wait for the products to be delivered. If the tipping point was not reached though, the deal is cancelled and no charge is made. DS has a roughly similar list of deals as DealsDiBa – almost exclusively lifestyle products.

A-Deals

Facebook Likes: 6,343

A-Deals oozes exclusivity. How exclusive? Exclusive to the Ayala Group of malls, that’s how. For those not in the know, the Ayala Group of companies is one of the predominant business entities in the Philippines. Malls, real estate, banking, you name it. As such, expect a higher quality of deals here, though expect a slightly higher price tag as well. You’ll find designer labels, fine dining, beauty products and treatment, even deals for the popular Ayala Cinema movie line. What you won’t find of are the travel packages you see on every other e-commerce site. And there aren’t as many deals as a whole, but given that the site draws exclusively from Ayala malls, that’s understandable. Credit card, PayPal and over the counter at BPI payment modes are available, and you get a coupon for redemption once payment is made.

OkayOkay

Facebook Likes: 3,341

OkayOkay is a take on the Filipino word Ukay-Ukay, which has come to mean thrift or discount store, often selling second hand items. OkayOkay is a relatively standard e-commerce site, with a fair amount of deals, though none are truly exclusive, and you don’t get the massive volume of deals from more prominent sites. There aren’t any revolutionary innovations either, as you still get the standard printable voucher once a purchase is made. And these purchases are again payable with credit cards, PayPal, and your run of the mill over-the-counter bank payments. OkayOkay does have a cash back feature though, in the form of the OKash program. Since you can register an OkayOkay account through Facebook, you can also share a link from the site on your facebook page, and every time anyone clicks that link, you get three percent of its value in ‘OKash’. That OKash can be spent on other deals on OkayOkay.

Pinoy Great Deals

Facebook Likes: 3,295

Finally, an e-commerce site not centred in Metro Manila. Pinoy Great Deals (PGD) is actually a Cebu-based site, and is still the only such venture out of the Queen City of the South. PGD doesn’t make any daring changes in terms of operating platform. You still get a voucher once you pay with your credit card using PayPal, and registration is still free. The site features a complete list of all its partner merchants though, something you seldom see in other e-commerce sites. And aside from your standard gadgets, beauty products and tour packages, PGD is one of the few sites that offer specialised services like immigration consultation and English language proficiency tests. You can also get PHP 100 (US$2.43) referral for recommending friends to join up.

Pick Perfect

Facebook Likes: 2,496

Founded in August and launched in October of 2012 by Dottie Libiran and Tintin Agapito, Pick Perfect (PP) is relatively new to the scene. This is clearly obvious by the lack of variety in items for sale, and by the overall quality of deals available. Not that the quality is low or bad, just not high profile, and there is an abundance of local products as well. Payment options are the norm: credit cards, PayPal, etc. And you have your standard voucher or coupon for redeeming your purchase as well. All in all, PP seems like an e-commerce version of your small-town family-operated business.

Pinoy Vouchers

Facebook Likes: 1,900

Pinoy Vouchers (PV) is another group buying site, and shares a lot in common with others of its kind. You get the standard voucher system, a coupon you can print after purchasing so you can redeem your purchased deal. You can pay via credit card, PayPal, or over the counter at banks. The deals offered by PV are somewhat standard as well. There are vacation tour packages, beauty products, and other lifestyle products. One thing seldom seen at other sites, though, are deals for discounted ballet lessons for adults and kids, as well as violin group lessons.

My Deluxe City

Facebook Likes: 1,670

The last site on this list is My Deluxe City (MDC). It offers a fair range of deals, mostly lifestyle products like beauty and grooming products, spa and salon treatments, though they do offer some gadgets and clothing items. Forget about vacation packages here, they’re nowhere to be found. And MDC has a section called ‘private sale’, which is supposedly exclusive to MDC-VIP members, but after creating a quick trial account, these VIP deals appear to be accessible to all.

Back in October last year, China’s second-biggest B2C e-commerce site launched a global version of its store that ships items from China. Now, after half a year of operations and a rebrand for the entire company from 360Buy to Jingdong, I was curious how the overseas sales were going, and asked the company for an update.

We’re told that the international site (see here) is handling the rebranding by focusing on the acronym JD, though the frontpage URL of the revamped site hasn’t been updated yet. In its early stages, the Amazon-esque JD Global, which sells everything from iPad cases to wedding dresses, shoes to CDs, is proving popular with overseas Chinese. Jingdong VP of retail and overseas markets, Shi Tao, explains to TechinAsia:

We are getting great early traction selling Chinese language books overseas. Given the number of Chinese living abroad, the challenges of carrying books internationally and the desire of people internationally to keep in touch with Chinese culture, books were a logical early target product. The JD.com Global site has a catalogue of more than half a million Chinese language books for consumers abroad, which is something you just can’t find in foreign markets.

It seems like a good niche market to cater to, as the China-only Jingdong business effectively gives JD Global a larger collection than Amazon’s line-up of Chinese language books in the US or the UK. Plus, there’s an element of trust and brand recognition among this audience and the well-established Jingdong site. Plus, books are generally not a time-sensitive product – which is just as well when global shipping from JD’s China warehouses can take a couple of weeks.

“A bite of China”

Jingdong explains that most of its book buyers are in the US, and that buyers tend to be individuals, not small businesses. The current best-seller on the site is A Bite of China, the DVD and book combo version of the popular cookery program by state broadcaster CCTV. Second is a book on the programming language Java. It’s an odd mix, but it’s apparently what overseas Chinese want. Plus, they get free shipping on purchases over $29, which includes those two popular titles.

Aside from that early traction, Jingdong representatives point out to us that the JD Global site is still at a very early stage, and they’re exploring different demands in different markets and trying to remain flexible.

While JD is unique in shipping to overseas customers from its own warehouses in China, it’s not the only option for consumers looking to buy stuff from China. Jingdong would not compare itself with ‘source from China’ platforms like Alibaba-owned AliExpress or smaller rival LightIntheBox, but there is some overlap in terms of products available on all three, such as things people overseas might really want to buy from China (knowing how much cheaper they are to make in mainland China) such as smartphone accessories or wedding dresses. But JD Global is the only one shipping books, movies, and music to an international audience. Plus, JD would argue that it’s safer to buy direct from them, rather than from other sites that are a conduit for Chinese factory suppliers.

Presumably Jingdong wants a broader audience for its JD Global site eventually, but the Chinese diaspora seems like a good kickstarter.

Jingdong is second only to Alibaba’s Tmall in China’s massive B2C e-commerce market. Jingdong wrapped up a funding round worth $700 million in February, and is said by some analysts to be preparing a US IPO later this year.

If you’ve been following e-commerce and daily deals in Vietnam, you know that Nhom Mua fell hard late last year due to internal issues. And in the midst of that, Nhom Mua’s original founder, Tom Tran, got ousted. Well, Tom is back, with a new daily deals site to take on Nhom Mua, and it’s called Kay.

For an already bloated daily deals market, where at one point in time over 90 players were vying for the market, it’s an odd shot in the dark for Kay to step in, since it’s going to have to work hard to catch up. Today, there are about four dominant players in Vietnam’s daily deals market, namely Nhom Mua, Hotdeal, Mua Chung, and Cung Mua. What Kay does have going for it is a founder well-versed in how to make daily deals succeed.

When you take a look at the site, it’s very clear and not so overwhelmed with deals like the current leaders. This could be because they’re new, but it also makes for a nice interface. Kay features three services: services, tourism, and coupons, but the two former features have not been opened up on the site yet.

I’ve reached out to the Kay team, but according to Ngan from Action.vn, Tom usually hides from the media.

Xend is unique. At the very least, that’s what its founder, Bjorn Pardo, would have you believe. As he says:

We are very unique. Depending on the point of view, we could be considered as a courier, e-commerce or technology company. For most, we are a courier company primarily serving the e-commerce market. Internally, we consider ourselves a hybrid of the 3 above industries.

Unique or not, Xend does offer some innovations its competitors don’t. The playing field is rife with courier services, LBC, 2GO, JRS and Air21. You can even see the occasional FedEx and DHL truck scurrying around the metro on any given day. How Xend differs itself is on e-commerce.

Founded in 2004 as Xend Business Center, as a single proprietorship by Bjorn Pardo, in Makati City, Xend initially offered only international logistic and courier services. It wasn’t until 2006 that Xend started offering domestic courier services, and later that year, a door to door tracking system. In 2007, Xend was incorporated as Xend Business Solutions Inc. and moved to it’s new headquarters in Mandaluyong City. 2008 saw the release of its revolutionary myXend Online Shipping Platform, which provided online real-time booking, online waybill printing and auto-email shipment status notifications.

By focusing primarily on online establishments and sellers, Xend has quickly amassed a database of well over 50,000 partnered e-commerce merchants. And a quick look at this list reveals it is quite formidable, with the likes of Ebay.ph, Sulit.com.ph and PisoBid to name a few. But even if you’re not into e-commerce, or just a bit old fashioned, Xend has the capability to serve any business that needs documents or parcels delivered, not just online ones.

For sole founder Bjorn Pardo, innovation came out of necessity.

I started selling online as a teenager and my biggest problem was high shipping fees and inconvenient processes. I had to waste hours in my day just to bring parcels to the post office, fill out forms and email my customers their tracking numbers. On top of that, I was losing sales because of high shipping costs which were beyond my control. I knew there had to be a better way to do this so I founded Xend.

So what is this better way? According to their site, it involves just three simple steps. First, register for a myXend account from their website, which only takes a few seconds. Second, prepare your package for shipping. With Xend, there’s no minimum purchase required, and you can ship anything from a television to a pencil. You can either print out the waybill to attach to the package, or use a handwritten one, which you can get from the courier on pickup day. Finally, schedule a pickup date, and one of their couriers will be along to take up your package for delivery.

For the package itself, Xend offers 2 pouch sizes, measuring either a large 9×14 inches or an extra large 12×18 inches. The large pouch costs PHP 59 (US$ 1.43) to ship within Metro Manila and PHP 89 (US$ 2.16) to any other point in the country. For the XL pouch it’s PHP 79 (US$ 1.91) for Manila and PHP 139 (US$ 3.37) everywhere else. For either pouch, there is no limit on weight, as long as it’ll fit inside, it’s a go. Packages that can’t fit inside one of the pouches will have to be weighed though, and the pricing based on that weight. All couriers are equipped with their own weighing scales upon pick-up.

Xend offers a host of other features as well: scheduling, monitoring deliveries, waybill printing, all can be done online, no more calling customer service hotlines. Pick-ups are free, and Xend claims their service costs sixty percent less than the competition.[1] They’ll even pick up the tab for you if the delivery is late. Xend even ships abroad.

We are number one in our space now and we are the only ones who can consistently provide excellent door to door delivery. We can cut down your shipping process from 2 hours to 2 minutes. Imagine, we will pick up a pencil, if that is what you want to ship, for free and deliver it the next day within Metro Manila and within 1–2 days to anywhere else nationwide. Just schedule a pickup online before 2pm and will be there within the day. No need to call or anything, it’s all automated. It’s really that simple.

When asked if Xend has plans of expanding abroad:

Yes, that is in our plans. Initially in South East Asia but even further later on. We believe that the software we built can be applied anywhere in the region, even the world.

We recently covered GHN in Vietnam, like them, Xend has offered innovations in logistic and courier services custom tailored towards e-commerce, featuring fast and efficient deliveries, and accurate, real-time online tracking and monitoring.

If you want to source goods from China, there are other choices beyond Alibaba/AliExpress. One of these is Beijing-based LightInTheBox, which has just filed with the SEC for a $86.25 million IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.

Hoping to soon hit Wall Street tickers as NYSE:LITB, LightInTheBox’s F1 filing points out how it ships items from Chinese suppliers – anything from wedding dresses to China-brand smartphones and tablets – to customers in over 200 countries. The key stats:

We have grown significantly since we commenced our operations. Our net revenues grew from $6.3 million in 2008 to $200.0 million in 2012. The number of our customers increased from approximately 36,000 in 2008 to approximately 2.5 million in 2012. We experienced a net loss of $3.0 million, $4.8 million, $21.9 million, $24.5 million and $4.2 million in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012, respectively. We also used cash in operating activities of $2.1 million, $2.3 million, $19.9 million and $14.1 million in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, respectively. We generated $7.4 million in cash from operating activities in 2012.

LightInTheBox – previously invested in by Zhenfund – has assigned Credit Suisse, Stifel, Pacific Crest Securities, and Oppenheimer and Co as its underwriters. It’ll be the first Chinese tech IPO since the largely positive listing of gaming platform YY (NASDAQ:YY) in November. With Chinese authorities having been busy cleaning up the accounting practices of local firms after last summer’s scandal over the ‘Big Four’ auditors, there’s likely a backlog of Chinese companies keen to go public. That could dampen their reception in the months to come and exhaust the capital markets, so LightInTheBox could benefit from being first out of the gate this year.

As with any B2B2B e-commerce platform, one of the biggest problems for LightInTheBox is preventing fraud by unscrupulous suppliers. That can be a costly and labor-intensive exercise. Indeed, the company routes all packages via its ‘International Distribution Center’ for quality control checks. In contrast, Alibaba.com is aiming to perform factory checks at all suppliers. The SEC filing further points out that LightInTheBox plans “to expand our warehouses and distribution network,” and that it’s absolutely critical to its survival.

This is an increasingly crowded sector. Aside from old rival DHGate, the consumer-oriented JingDong (formerly branded 360Buy) launched its international site last October with an emphasis on things that individuals or small business might want to source from Chinese factories – such as wedding dresses and gadget accessories.

Indonesia has Korean fever. Sensing an opportunity, Korean fashion e-store Thehallyu rolled out an Indonesian language version of the site last month. And just a few weeks after the launch, Thehallyu now hits weekly sales of more than US$10,000 globally since its launch in December.

(Clarification: While the site has been up and running since December, Thehallyu only started to sell its wares in March.)

Founder Kim Min-soo explains about this decision to target the Indonesian market:

Based on research results, the Korean wave in Indonesia is larger than in neighboring countries, not only from the scope of entertainment such as music and drama, but also fashion and lifestyle.

Most of the products are made in and shipped from South Korea, and to make sure its operation in Indonesia runs smoothly, Thehallyu partners with Inlite Indonesia. The local partner has expertise in digital marketing research and consulting.

At the moment, there are only women’s fashion items being sold on the site, but the company plans to launch its men’s fashion in a couple of weeks. The site looks very simple and clean, and you can browse through its catalog either by brands or item categories. So far, the site offers over 5,000 products.

The products aren’t cheap, though. The average price is around IDR 300,000 ($31). But Kim says that Indonesia’s average expenditure on online shopping is IDR 500,000 ($51) per transaction right now, which means that the store’s product pricing is still in-line with the market. Thehallyu’s main target consumer is those aged between 18 to 35 years old.

Look, we avoided mentioning Gangnam Style… D’OH!

Thehallyu also offers discounts of 15 percent and 20 percent for resellers and wholesalers for a spending minimum of $500 and $750 respectively. So they are implementing both B2C and B2B business models.

One thing that the site still needs to work on is its payment options. It accepts PayPal, but not a lot of Indonesians are using that. If users opt to pay via credit cards, they need to do so in US dollars. The Thehallyu uses only BCA bank for its accounts in Indonesia, which will incur a small administration fee if transferred through other banks. The team is looking to add more payment options soon, with Mandiri Clickpay looming big on its agenda.

Besides Indonesia, Thehallyu targets France and Japan too, and you can change the pricing currency according to the corresponding nation. Thehallyu offers a flat shipping rate of $18 worldwide, but if users make purchases above $150, then it will be free.

TheHallyu is one of the latest vertical e-commerce sites popping up in Indonesia. And just like the lingerie site OgahMahal, those stores serve a niche and will have their own loyal customers. The Korean appeal helps a lot in Indonesia these days – something that chat app KakaoTalk is also emphasizing in its Indonesian marketing.

Perhaps even more significant, though, is that CNNIC says 242 million Chinese users bought things over the web last year. That’s a big number, but in a country with more than 1.3 billion people, it also belies just how much room there is for the Chinese e-commerce market to grow over the long term — especially if China’s economy keeps growing along with it.

The most common purchases online — by far — were clothing items (including shoes and hats), with 81.8 percent of e-commerce users having bought at least one clothing item online every six months. Next was daily necessities, which 31.6 percent of users bought. Third in line was computers and other digital electronics, which 29.6 percent of users purchased.

40.7 percent of e-commerce users in China used a mobile device to browse e-commerce sites at least once in the past half year, and of those users, 53.6 percent used a mobile app connected to the e-commerce platform they were browsing (as opposed to the phone’s web browser). Unsurprisingly, that’s a significant increase from last year. And if Alibaba’s numbers are any indication, next year is likely to be even bigger.

(CNNIC via Sina Tech, image source)

(Updated on April 18th: BeautyTreats launched last month. The article incorrectly stated that the startup launched on the same date with Lolabox. We apologize for the confusion.)

Lolabox, a startup that offers monthly subscriptions for boxes of beauty products, launches today in Indonesia. The company is founded by two ex-Rocket Internet employees, Christian Sutardi and Cynthia Chaerunnisa, both of whom will look to disrupt the beauty and make-up industry in the country by being one of the first movers. Of course, it already has a couple of rival startups to deal with.

Lolabox has been incubated by and received invested from Grupara, which is the incubator’s second investment this year after men’s fashion store Maskool.in. The beauty box startup also has Yazid Faizin and Pandu Wirawan as digital marketing partners, both of whom are co-founders of advertisement network Adplus. Furthermore, design and technology studio Weekend has joined in to become Lolabox’s tech partners. So far the company has deals with more than 15 beauty brands.

Christian says there will be others following in the beauty box sector in Indonesia. When that time comes, he believes Lolabox can still survive:

Lolabox will always be awesome even if heavier competition appears, because of our extreme focus on beauty brand satisfaction. Every single meeting helps us to understand the brands’ needs even more and we try to come up with great solutions. Actually we have improved our offer to brands a lot as we understand that better relationships help us to secure the latest and most exciting products for our members.

Apart from that we will provide amazing original content in our e-mag (LolaMag) and various social media channels. The box is just the beginning of an exciting journey – right now we can’t reveal too much though.

New rivals: BeautyTreats and VanityTrove

Indeed there are already other competitors looking to grab the same market niche with similar products here in Indonesia. They are VanityTrove Indonesia and BeautyTreats. The latter officially launched just last month.

BeautyTreats is developed by Romeo Reijman, the one behind sexy football news startup DewiBola, and his celebrity sister Rebecca Reijman. Romeo explains that it started offering beauty boxes as early as last month, and once sold 250 box subscriptions in just six days. The startup now has 937 members.

Updated: I misquoted Romeo about him saying the word “better” when he just said “cheaper.”

Romeo believes that BeautyTreats offers more affordable products and has a strong Facebook community with lots of female followers. In reality, they both offer different beauty products and there’s enough room in the market for such competition.

Indonesia looks like it will become a new battleground for emerging beauty box and other ‘subcom’ startups. Singapore has seen its own beauty box business model blooming, with VanityTrove, Bellabox, Glamabox, and the newest one being the Little Black Beauty Box.

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) launched its e-bookstore and e-reading apps in China last December, but there’s still something missing – sales of the actual Kindle hardware. That’s rumored to be changing tomorrow, April 16th, with Amazon thought to be opening pre-orders for the Kindle Paperwhite in China.

Chinese tech blog Huxiu reckons that the date will see the basic Kindle finally rolls out in mainland China – but with no apparent sign of the Android-powered Kindle Fire tablets.

The Kindle e-reader has been on the rumormill in China for years – just as it was in Japan before Amazon’s hardware eventually launched there last October.

Though Amazon is doing fairly well with e-commerce in China – well, it’s surviving anyway – it will, as a foreign company, struggle with regulatory approval for wireless hardware in China. As Bloomberg notes on that previous link, “Wireless devices require at least three layers of regulatory approval in China, including from the state Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.”

Regardless of whether Amazon brings the hardware to Chinese consumers, the US e-tailer has tons of competition in the e-book sector in China, from newer entrants like retail giant Suning and social network Douban, to older adversaries like Shanda and Dangdang. The last two even have their own e-reader products; Dangdang’s is dubbed Doucan, which launched last summer, while Shanda’s Bambook is a long-standing leader in this sector.

After the kerfuffle between Alibaba and Google last summer over an Acer-made phone for Alibaba’s cloud-oriented mobile OS, it’s clear that China’s top homegrown OS cannot partner up with any handset makers that belong to Google’s not very open ‘Open Handset Alliance’. Today’s unveiling of six new Aliyun-powered phones therefore features an abundance of China-brand phone-makers, none of which will be familiar to the average Chinese shopper.

Alibaba’s newly-appointed CEO Jonathan Lu was on hand for the launch event, according to iFanr. The six new models are all budget handsets, ranging from RMB 799 to 1,399 (US$128 to $224) from five domestic brands: G’Five, Amoi, Yusun, ZOPO, and KOMI (pictured below). Nope, not heard of any of those either.

That’s a big problem for Alibaba’s mobile OS, which is up against the myriad appeals of iOS and Android, including popular big-screen phones from the likes of Samsung and more well-known Chinese brands like ZTE and Huawei. There are an estimated 160 million active Android users in China, and 85 million on iPhones.

Today’s event seems to be something of a reboot for Alibaba’s mobile ambitions. Indeed, the branding seems to have changed as well, with the “Aliyun” name ditched in favor of “Alibaba Mobile Operating System” (UPDATED to correct the new name; the “YunOS” name is just the URL. In addition to the name change, Alibaba’s official blog notes four new strategies to get more people onto Alibaba Mobile Operating System:

• A more focused online sales strategy for the phones, using the company’s own Tmall Taobao site, on yun.taobao.com.

• It will subsidize handset makers by paying them an ongoing fee of RMB 1 ($0.16) a month for every phone they sell, providing the phone’s owner remains an active user of the software.

• Alibaba will encourage software developers to build cloud-based applications for the OS through a RMB 1 billion ($160 million) program that will funnel funds to app makers through revenue sharing and other incentives or rewards. Full details will be revealed later.

• It is working with smartphone makers and telecom operators to give financing options to Alibaba Mobile OS phone buyers who sign up for mobile-phone service plans. New phone owners will be vetted via their purchasing history on Alibaba sites.

Alibaba’s own mobile OS launched in the summer of 2011. Aside from revealing one million sales 10 months after launch, it’s not clear how well it’s going. But with China having about 300 million smartphone owners right now, one million is a drop in the ocean. The e-commerce giant will be hoping that its new strategies and greater spread of handset options – along with their ability to run many Android apps via virtualization, sort of like how Blackberry 10 can do so – will give its mobile platform a much-needed boost.

Chinese search engine Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) invested $306 million in Qunar back in the summer of 2011 to take a majority stake in the travel e-commerce site. Today Qunar is reported to have secured a new funding round worth $57 million with backing from Baidu, Hillhouse Capital, and GGV Capital.

TechCrunch notes (via First Financial Daily) that the newest $57 million investment was finalized last month but has not yet been confirmed by Baidu. Today’s round effectively values Qunar at about $483 million.

Qunar is one of a number of high-profile Chinese web companies thought to be building towards a US IPO sometime this year having previously vowed to go public as soon as “the market stabilizes.”

Chinese e-commerce giant 360Buy — which I suppose I ought to be calling Jingdong now — quietly picked up the domain wangyin.com on Friday. That may not mean anything to you if you don’t speak Chinese, but it’s the pinyin romanization for the term “online banking” in Chinese, and as such, it sends a pretty clear message about what Jingdong is planning to do with the domain.

Last year, the company acquired the third-party payment company Online Banking, so it seems pretty probable that this domain is meant for that team. But insiders also have said that the company is working on its own payment platform, so it’s possible the domain will also be used for that in addition to whatever the Online Banking team will be doing with it. Or perhaps Online Banking’s services will be merged into the new platform.

So we’ll have to wait and see to find out exactly what Jingdong does with its shiny new domain name, but it’s pretty clear it’s going to have something to do with e-payments. Could it pose a threat to Alibaba’s Alipay?

(via TechWeb)

Founded by Phillip Pastoral and the United Neon Group, LocalRoam started up in November 2011. I had a chat with Vanessa Lizano, LocalRoam’s assistant manager for details of how Localroam is doing:

What is LocalRoam?

Vanessa: It acts like a purchasing department for SMEs and households to help them maximize their purchasing power. At the same time the co-op encourages reciprocity from its members to encourage loyalty. We believe preferential prices can and should be given as a reward for customer loyalty.

Can you clarify what a “loyalty-based cooperative buying online marketplace” actually is?

Vanessa: Loyalty means Localroam avoids enlisting directly competing companies (and if so, for a collaborative purpose) and promoting directly competing products/services. As a result, the offer selections are limited but well-selected so buyers are encouraged to patronize our co-op businesses in return for better prices.

How and why did you come up with the idea behind LocalRoam?

Vanessa: We observed how giant corporations or rich individuals enjoy better price preferences because of volume-buying. We want to do the same for SMEs and the ordinary consumer by helping them aggregate their purchases in return for loyalty. The co-op promotes loyalty by selecting and promoting non-competing co-op partners.

How do you “value” a consumer’s loyalty? Do you give rebates, for example? Or a bigger discount if one’s buying for an organization?

Vanessa: We get the best discounts normally reserved for top clients (usually large corporations) and pass it on to our members. The discounts may be less than group buy discounts, but they are always available. It’s a new way of doing things.

What is the main difference between LocalRoam and other group buying sites?

Vanessa: Localroam is an ongoing sales channel for our businesses. Offers are made available on a more long-term basis of a few days only. Because of this, relationships with our co-op partners are long-term so it is in our interest to help them develop and grow to serve our buying members. Group buy deals are very short-term and keep changing (often with competitors). It doesn’t encourage strong relationships between buyers and sellers or what we call in the Philippines a “suki” relationship.

SME members and consumer members get to find quality services and save money on those using the convenience of an online marketplace. LocalRoam does all the heavy leg-work of selecting and qualifying offers then get the best prices for our members so they do not have to waste precious time and energy looking, screening and negotiating. This is a big advantage big companies have which the small buyer doesn’t have.

Can you share some of LocalRoam’s goals?

Vanessa: Our immediate goal is to form a strong community of partners with the Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) at the core and help our partners establish strong trade within the co-op. Each partner brings with it their own community of employees, clients, depositors, etc. Long-term will would like to see SMEs and households save up to 10 percent of their budgets to help them put it to more productive use.

Just like any form of business, we’d be curious how they actually make money. According to Vanessa, the lifeblood of their biz comes from “transaction commission”. Not bad, I think. If it’s any indication, LocalRoam with more than 27,000 likes on their Facebook page, I could only assume their revenue must be good.

With China’s e-commerce market set to be worth at least $175 billion this year, it’s a massive market where a new entrant will struggle to stand out. But Iwannabuy won’t have the same trouble, as it rocks two interesting niches: it caters to expats living in China, and it supports payments in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a digital currency not tied to the usual government regulations, and which is now traded on the new Mt. Gox exchange in Tokyo. Beijing-based Paul Afshar explained to us that for his e-commerce startup, which sells a small selection of items as diverse as air pollution filters, juicers, and music festival tickets, the decision to accept Bitcoin is shaped by its user-base:

We started out accepting PayPal payment and cash on delivery (COD), which is very important for Chinese customers, and we continue to accept these payment platforms, complemented by Bitcoin payment.

However, many of IwannaBuy’s customers don’t have online banking enabled for their Chinese bank accounts, or have encountered problems with using PayPal or AliPay for online payment. In Beijing, this means they have problems buying the pollution products we sell, including indoor air purifiers and anti-pollution masks, to protect their health from poor air quality in the city.

Bitcoin, with a growing user base in China, cannot be ignored. For an e-commerce platform like ours, it offers a simple payment system that can be accessed easily both from a computer or a mobile device.

While Bitcoin payment is still a nascent and developing platform, we want to help pioneer its use in the world’s biggest consumer market.

“No currency conversion issues”

Paul adds that Bitcoin offers the benefit of there being “no currency conversion issues, unlike paying with a US credit card” – again, another useful feature for a mixed, global user-base. So far, Iwannabuy has about 10,000 shoppers, mostly in Beijing, in the 16 months since it launched.

Beyond those quirks, site itself is a fairly conventional online discount site. Paul says he spotted “a niche in the market for providing quality of life products to expats living in China”. And so the site is only in English. But Paul notes that the pollution woes in Beijing as well as the recent dead-pigs-in-the-river scandal in Shanghai have brought some Chinese shoppers to the site in search of quality anti-pollution equipment, like water and air purifiers. Encouraged by that, the Iwannabuy team is building a Chinese iteration of the site. Along with a Chinese co-founder, the startup is now a team of five.

Of course, using Bitcoin has its risks for a business – not least in the wild fluctuation in the digital currency relative to the US dollar. Paul explains the site’s approach:

The price of Bitcoins has fluctuated greatly in 2013, with the (Chinese) RMB Bitcoin price quadrupling since the beginning of the year. If we accept Bitcoin payment, there’s always going to be a price fluctuation risk. Fortunately, payment providers like BitPay help you mitigate that risk by giving you the option to choose the proportion of payment made in Bitcoins and in hard currency, and also allowing a merchant to “cash-out” without too much hassle.

E-commerce marketplace site Qoo10 revealed that in 2012, its Singapore operations transacted US$73 million in sales. In Singapore, Qoo10 has a total of more than 900,000 members and 53,000 sellers.

The online marketplace charges commission from about six to twelve percent commission on sellers and makes about three to six percent off each transaction after footing peripheral costs. Based on its margin, we can deduce that Qoo10 Singapore’s commission revenue is anywhere from two to four million. Qoo10 also generates revenue by offering premium listings.

Qoo10 is the rebranded version of Gmarket which originated from South Korea and has a total of 450 employees with 40 in Singapore. Besides Singapore, Qoo10 is also operating in Hong Kong, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia and China. It is also celebrating its third anniversary on 23 April 2013.

China’s top e-commerce player, Alibaba, also runs the nation’s leading daily deals site. Run under the familiar Taobao brand name and URL as Juhuasuan, the site is today expanding to include customers and daily deals in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Centered around a new overseas site at hk.ju.taobao.com, the number of offers right now is very limited, but that will expand over time. The main Juhuasuan deals site has several thousand product listings at any given time, so it might be a while before relevant deals are made available to new users in Hong Kong and Taiwan. (UPDATED the stat about product listings to correct a mistake).

This new version of Juhuasuan will focus on deals for things like clothing, homeware, mother and baby products, consumer electronic accessories, and children’s toys. Travel and “lifestyle” deals will appear in a few weeks’ time, though it’s not clear if that will cover food/restaurants. But it will be an interesting challenge to Groupon in both Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The new site has ‘traditional’ Chinese characters, which is the script used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Just last week we were talking to Daphne Lee, the director of Taobao international business, who told us how Alibaba is keen to expand its various e-commerce offerings to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and across Southeast Asia, though there’s no word yet of the whole site being made available in English or other languages.

In today’s announcement, Daphne said:

[W]e firmly believe will enhance and complement the online shopping experience at Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com for our more-than two million registered users in Hong Kong and Taiwan. In 2012, we continued to improve upon platform infrastructure and introduced new features such as the Alipay Card to make online shopping more convenient for Hong Kong and Taiwan consumers. Users can expect an even more diverse and comprehensive set of new and localized features and services to be rolled out in 2013.

This is the second consumer-oriented Alibaba site to venture overseas after the afore-mentioned expansion of the C2C Taobao shopping site. The Juhuasuan overseas service is promising delivery of its items in one or two days. For travel and lifestyle deals, QR codes or serial numbers will be employed so that shoppers can collect their deal from a retailer.

In our most recent daily deals industry stats, Taobao Juhuasuan has 47.8 percent market share by revenue – that’s way ahead of the indie Groupon clone Meituan with 13.1 percent share.

Next up at Startup Arena is Pombai, a Bangkok-based startup that provides transport companies with an online ticketing system. In Thailand, city-to-city bus tickets are mostly purchased at the station counter or from agents – all of which is inconvenient.

Pombai’s idea is to create an online ticketing system to manage and sell transport companies’ inventory of spare tickets. It’s similar to Redbus in India, which is apparently doing very well.

But as a startup, it is hard to convince transport companies to entrust their inventories to Pombai. To kickstart his business, founder Joseph Finkenbinder started by buying tickets from bus companies and selling them online. It didn’t make Pombai any profit but it did validate that there is real demand. Finkenbinder says that there are more than 1,200 bus companies in Thailand with five major players holding 47 percent market share. The entire Thai bus transportation industry is worth $1.03 billion right now. In addition to its consumer-side site, Pombai is also making a business out of putting any transport ticketing systems online.

Pombai took part in Startup Bootcamp in Dublin last year and got $60,000 seed funding. His team is made up of people from Lithuania, Nepal, China, and Thailand. The site is available in three languages – Thai, Chinese, and English. Finkenbinder says that the same transport ticketing problem can also be found in China and Vietnam and is hopeful that Pombai can one day expand there in the near future.

One of the judges, Andrew Collins, from Mailman Group, says to Joseph after his demo that he’s concerned that there aren’t enough Thai people working at this startup. In such a culturally diverse country from the US/west, Andrew feels that more local input is needed.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For the rest of our Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

Singapore-based cosmetic and skincare e-commerce startup Luxola announces today that it has received series A funding from GREE Ventures for an undisclosed amount. The startup will use the funds to help its expansion plan across Southeast Asia as well as growing its product offerings.

Luxola founder and CEO Alexis Horowitz-Burdick said that they hope to expand to Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. e27 explained that Luxola has become GREE Ventures’ biggest investment as a Southeast Asian company. And that this falls into GREE Ventures’ US$ 25 million Asia fund.

Luxolaʼs founder and CEO Alexis Horowitz-Burdick

As mentioned, Luxola’s customers are women. And we know that GREE Ventures does believe in putting its money in e-commerce businesses, including Indonesia’s Berrybenka which targets women as well. This latest investment can complement those two portfolio companies to be the women’s answers to online shopping in the region.

Today Luxola also revealed its two new senior executives Christine Ng as chief marketing and product officer as well as Adrien Barthel as general manager for Indonesia. Prior to this investment, Luxola had raised S$740,000 funding from WaveMaker Labs, Singapore’s National Research Foundation, and angel investors. GREE Ventures itself has invested in an Indonesian women’s fashion online shop Berrybenka. This latest investment could be a signal to bridge those two businesses in Indonesia.

By the way, Alexis was one of our panelists speaking about women in tech startups at our Startup Asia Singapore event. She was quite straightforward in giving her answers and had some support from the audience for her views. And this latest news is a testament that women can indeed excel in the tech startup industry – not that we had any doubts at all. Her suggestion for fellow female entrepreneurs: be tough, in every way.

E-Commerce growth in China has been explosive, to say the least. Taobao’s at the head of that, and it’ll be interesting to see where they see themselves outside their mainland stronghold.

#14:47: This place has the “smell of money”, says Daphne to the audience, as some sort of surreal opening remark. This should get interesting.

#14:50: They’re looking to expand the Taobao ecosystem outside China. 7 million sellers on the platform now, and they’re looking at bringing more international users in. The two countries of focus are Hong Kong and Taiwan, though a lot of registered users from Malaysia and Singapore are using the platform too.

By end of 2012, 1.4 million users from Hong Kong on Taobao. In Taiwan, 600,000. 1 million from Southeast Asia – 280,000 of those from Singapore.

#14:53: Merchants coming onboard too, from outside China. International sellers like Microsoft opening Tmall stores. “Fashionable shoes brand” Charles and Keith have one too. *evil laugh* in response to question on Rakuten Vs Tmall.

#14:55: Localization and payment plans: “We’re looking at providing local services.” Plans are underway to involve local service providers for logistics and payments. They’re working with international shipping providers for better end-to-end tracking information for purchases. Alipay is a part of this expansion (accepting international credit cards etc., banks in other countries, local payment providers). Several partners-in-progress. “I can only reveal one…” *drumroll* Singapore’s DBS!

Sales pitch time now. DBS cardholders get rewards for all purchases above 50 RMB! /end sales pitch. Moving on swiftly.

#15:00: No luck on sales figures for international merchants within Taobao, or international sales figures of any kind. “That’s confidential,” she laughs. Friendliest “no comment” from a corporation this blogger has heard in a while.

#15:05: Does Taobao need to be more social? “We have forum!” says Daphne. “But in Chinese…I can translate for you.” Little does she know of ace TiA editor Steven Millward‘s l33t 中文 skills.

Tmall purchases coming from outside China too…but no plans for an English website yet. Not in 2013, atleast. It’s a big challenge, getting all merchant’s contents to make the transition too. “Anything is possible,” she says enigmatically. “But we need to focus on infrastructure and service first.” There is, however, a dedicated service line with English and Cantonese speakers for foreign users.

Mum’s the word on the possible Alibaba IPO. It was worth a shot.

#15:08: The Alibaba company, as a whole, is now taking baby steps internationally, Daphne says. But that pace will accelerate. Plug for Ali Express, kind of like an English Tmall.

#15:18: Over 6,000 people have used the Taobao API to develop services on the platform. Supplementary ecosystem activities gaining steam, with people targeting Taobao merchants for customer service training, inventory management. Customer focused apps too, such as comparative shopping. Open to working with startups to develop more services of this kind. Even considering strategic investments in particularly sharp ideas.

What does the future hold? More business operations. More infrastructure base. More marketing. More international merchants. More users. More “happy” users. More Taobao partners and developers.

In summary, Taobao strategy for 2013: MOAR.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For all our newest Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

We’ve seen US-based vacation home rentals site Airbnb pushing into Southeast Asia recently, so Jia Jih Chai has some ‘splaining to do. He’s the managing director at Airbnb Southeast Asia, and he’s now onstage being interviewed by my colleague, Minh. Here’s the liveblog:

#10:06: Where are the Asia hotspots for Airbnb users? They love Bali. Also, users are keen on unusual experiences, like a treehouse rental in Thailand’s Chiang Mai. Jia Jih himself has tried out rentals all over Asia.

#10:08: Jia Jih says there was no big idea behind Airbnb’s vision – like collaborative consumption or anything – and it was really just about solving a problem.

#10:09: How does Airbnb ensure security? After the 2011 case of a home rental being trashed in a rowdy party, the startup has added home guarantees – for up to $1 million. But it’s not yet rolled out in Asia. But the site does connect with social networks to ensure the real identity of users.

#10:11: Next Airbnb is focusing on experiences rather than huge numbers of places or users in Asia.

#10:12: They’re hoping guests will transform into hosts (listing their homes) in Asia. So they’ll spread by word-of-mouth in Asia just as they’ve done before. They have four million gusts so far – three million in 2012 alone.

#10:13: Jia Jih: “We’ve been global from the start.”

#10:14: No plans for acquisitions so as to expand in Asia – ie: not buying up new, local rivals like Travelmob.

#10:15: Local challenges: payments, credit card limits, and diverse languages.

#10:16: No plan to offer cash-on-demand (COD) in Asia, he says.

#10:17: Airbnb, he emphasizes, is focusing on new properties and experiences in the region. So the focus will be strong areas like Bali and Koh Samui.

#10:18: In Asia, the team needs to focus on persuading people how different the experience on Airbnb is – how it differs from hotels. So a local spot that needs attention is user education.

#10:20: Jia Jih gives the example of his own stays with Airbnb, where home-stays are personal; it’s a contrast to the distrust of hotels and the front-desk check-in. He says that hosts care about your stay and about you as a person. So Airbnb is about connections.

#10:21: A big difference in Asia is that hosting makes a real difference in terms of income for many Airbnb hosts in Asia. For example, one Airbnb host makes $60 a week from the platform and that guy uses it to educate his five kids.

#10:23: That’s the live blog over. Thanks for reading.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For all our newest Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

Regular Tech In Asia readers and craft enthusiasts might already be familiar with Hong Kong based Lots of Buttons, now the world’s largest button site. It hopes to expand to other craft items in the future, starting with beads and ribbons.

Lots of Buttons doesn’t just smother you with choice. It’s also the cheapest supplier, both on and offline, and features a slick frontend to help crafters easily find the right size, colour and shape (they’re a picky bunch). Currently focused on the US crafts market, they hope to “market in English, ship cheaper than competitors and be close to China,” where these materials are manufactured.

“We do this by disintermediating the entire value chain and going straight to the factory,” says founder Ken Lee. “Wholesaling and storage adds a lot to the cost of the buttons.”

Launched in June 2012, the firm is almost cash-break even.

“Two features we would really be keen on after getting an angel round investment,” Ken told us in an earlier interview and reiterated on stage, “is to offer people who buy our buttons and crafts materials the ability to post back on our site to sell it, similar to services like Etsy.” Lots of Buttons currently occupies what Ken calls a “sweet spot” combining low prices and broad selection.

Andrew Collins asked about the sustainability of the site’s supplier networks. Ken answered that these networks were well established now, and their supplier relations strong. Nobuaki Kitagawa asked for clarification on the site’s price competitiveness, to which Ken pointed out their proximity to manufacturers in China.

“I bet a lot of you are thinking, we should do zips…we should do socks!” joked judge Jeffrey Paine.

Too late. Apparently ‘Lots of Zippers’ has already been registered as an domain name.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For the rest of our Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

Following up, we have an all-woman discussion panel on female entreprenurship featuring the following entrepreneurs:

• Aileen Sim, Co-founder at BillPin
• Alexis Horowitz-Burdick, Founder and CEO at Luxola.com
• Meri Rosich, Founder and CEO at Quality Time Lab
• Gina Romero, Head of The Athena Network, Singapore
• Carmen Benitez, Founder at Fetch Plus Inc

#15:38: Alexis finds that gender is not an issue in hiring. As for Carmen, she finds that hiring woman will affect business in a positive way.

#15:39: For Meri, she finds that hiring female might provide a different perspective to the business in terms of marketing and strategy and that having gender diversity is a good idea. Gina also agrees, but emphasizes that it is essential to hire people that will fit the company’s culture.

#15:43: The question posed to Gina: What is the statistic of women demographic in the startup scene? She states that 5% of startups are owned by woman in Singapore, while in Silicon Valley, 10% of the startups are founded by women.

#15:44: Alexis shares that employs 60% women and 40% men in Luxola.com. Carmen finds that we should encourage woman to work in startups, as she feels that at the end of the day it is easier to work in a startup.

#15:47: Aileen says the main point is to find the best person for the job, but not to discriminate any gender. However, there is still no doubt that everyone has gender biases, and that our mindset has already been conditioned.

#15:49: Vanessa pointed out that in the panel, Aileen is the only Asian entrepreneur stage. What is typically expected of an Asian woman and do such expectations are actually stops them from entering startups or even taking on leadership positions?

#15:50: Meri mentioned that every country has different expectations for men and women, and says that we should encourage and have more female role models to show that the startup world is exciting.

#15:57: For Alexis, she mentioned that they are adding 20% headcount to Luxola every month and is on the lookout for the best skillset.

#15:59: Carmen said  that she will not rule off hiring females who are bearing a child as they might be able to work from home, instead from the office.

#16:00: Meri also commented that females entrepreneurs should not hold back if they would like to start a family. She added that multi-tasking could even make themselves more efficient.

#16:03: Meri mentioned that Asia is the next emerging market with a great talent pool be it female or male.

#16:05: Gina advise potential female entrepreneurs to actively seek for opportunities in the market for their ideas. Meri also agrees that everyone should dream big, and to look out for investors for instance.

#16:09: An audience brought up the issue of funding from investors for female entrepreneurs, whether if it is difficult to convince investors to invest in them compared to a male entrepreneur. Meri says that it depends on the investors you speak to. If the investor is a good match for you, they will create a good connection and bring your business to the next level.

#16:10:Alexis finds that the most important issue is to sell your idea and represent your startup well, and not an issue of gender when it comes to investing.

#16:13: Meri finds that it is similar to dating. As for Aileen, she has yet to run into problems explicitly when looking for funding, or have investors asking her questions about her personal life.

#16:18: That’s all folks for the live coverage for this interesting discussion! Stay tuned for our Startup Arena coverage coming up next!

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For all our newest Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

Currently onstage now is the founder of Thailand’s e-commerce site Tarad.com, Pawoot Pongvitayapanu or Pom. Interviewed by Willis Wee, Pom talks about the lessons he learned after Japan-based e-commerce giant Rakuten bought a majority stake of Tarad in 2009.

#15:02: Tarad is a marketplace and it was started in 2001. Pom said that it was the worst time to start a business because Thailand was having a crisis then.

#15:05: Pom said that – if based on newspaper reports – Rakuten bought majority stake on Tarad for US$3 million. He said that everything changed after Rakuten came in. Now that they’re working with Rakuten, everything has to be in numbers, everything has to be punctual. “We have morning meeting, each team has daily communication, and every person has to submit report every day,” said Pom.

#15:07: KPI tree is important, we break down our target numbers like traffic and buyer convertion. Each KPI belongs to each department, and each department’s KPI is broken down to each person.

#15:09: You can download Pom’s KPI spreadsheet through his personal website Pawoot.com. But it needs some translation effort.

#15:12: Most people work for money, but if you’re working for another reason which is bigger like to empower the society, it is better as you are more purpose-driven. “Rakuten made us believe that we can grow and change the lives of the society and country. It is important to us.” Before getting acquired, Pom didn’t have that way of thinking.

#15:14: Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani inspired Pom. “If you’re working in Rakuten, you know everything.” It is because the employees always communicate with each other every day.

#15:17: It was very hard to convince people to shop online, but after getting acquired by Rakuten, credit card has become the majority of online payment method on Tarad. If Pom had the chance to do it all over again, he would run his company just like Rakuten does.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For all our newest Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

Shin Hasegawa, assistant CMO and head of Asia marketing at Rakuten (JSD:4755), is onstage now to discuss how the Japanese e-commerce giant is expanding across the region. Despite the company’s strength, it has failed in China and is now struggling in Indonesia, so it’s an interesting challenge that entrepreneurs can learn from. Here’s the live blog:

#11:39: After stressing how Rakuten is an open marketplace with an emphasis on being a cross-border ecosystem, Shin says the company is always keen to make partnerships in Asia. Now the audience has his email address too.

#11:39: Shin admits that only operating from Tokyo did become difficult, so being “in the center of Asia” in Singapore is beneficial for hiring talent and lots of other things. And now Rakuten “is getting the benefit” from this presence already after opening the Singapore office last year.

#11:40: Rakuten goes into countries in different ways: “Whatever’s the best way,” Shin says, is a better way to operate. Startups can be “part of the family or ecosystem” when Rakuten goes into new markets.

#11:43: In terms of startup partnerships, the first focus is of course e-commerce, payments, and logistics. The second area is broader, he says, which is any service “beneficial to our users”. That covers the recently launched Rakuten Fund.

#11:44: “We’re not looking at financial gains” for the fund, and it’s also about the ecosystem.

#11:48: There is a focus on places like Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, etc., but Rakuten won’t rule out any areas.

#11:49: The Rakuten Singapore office is now up to 20-25 people, and will grow to 45-50 later this year. He says he’s interviewing a lot, “in an aggressive interviewing mode” in his working time.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For all our newest Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

Daily deals have been one of the biggest trends to hit the internet since social media. Pioneered and popularized by Groupon, the deals model swept the world by storm and the Philippines is no exception. The pole star in the Philippines is Ralph Wunsch’s MetroDeal, which gets over two million unique visitors per month and is currently the Philippines’ number one e-commerce site.

Since I’ll be chatting with Ralph on April 5th at Startup Asia, I thought it’d be nice for you to have a quick preview of what MetroDeal is all about and what kinds of insights can be gleaned from his work.

Ralph’s actually half Austrian and half Filipino. Having worked successfully in a daily deals site in Austria, he went on to found MetroDeal in the Philippines.

Ralph started MetroDeal alone in late 2010 with one laptop and working out of his apartment. Within 15 minutes of launching the website, he sold his first deal. It went on to sell over one thousand times. In the first month, he made $50,000 of sales. By his fourth month, he had already hit $1 million. This was all in a period when he was hacking away solo with one person to do customer service. By the end of 2011, he had over 20 employees and by the end of 2012, he had over 50 people.

By 2012, MetroDeal achieved over $18 million in sales and is projected to hit $20 million by the end of 2013. It’s currently profitable.

Much of MetroDeal’s success can be attributed to a local market that was still weak in understanding the market for daily deals and the enticing offers his site pushed forward. One offer that Ralph noted to me was a buffet dinner cruise that was offered at 50 percent off. This deal sold over 40,000 times in two days alone. According to Ralph:

That’s a record in all of Southeast Asia, even. And that came out when we were barely six months old. It’s deals like these that really put us on the map.

Next up for MetroDeal is the launching of a new travel portal that will leverage their market penetration where sites like Agoda are still unknown.

Swing by in the afternoon at 3:30pm on April 5th (the second day of our event) where I’ll be interviewing Ralph to get more details on MetroDeal and the key elements to his success that we can glean for our own startups.

Rakuten isn’t all about e-commerce or its Kobo e-reader. It also runs Rakuten Travel, an online travel agency (OTA), which is popular in Japan. The company is also serious about expanding the service to Southeast Asia, with its new Rakuten Asia headquarters in Singapore established just recently.

Rakuten Travel has had offices in Thailand since June of 2008, and in Indonesia since April, 2012. In recent months, it has established offices in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia. The key function of these offices is to work with hotels in each country. Revenue growth for this division has been pretty decent so far in Southeast Asia, growing 30 percent from 2011 to 2012. A representative for Rakuten Travel declined to disclose specific revenue figures but confirmed that the base number is probably still relatively small.

Yoshihisa Yamada, the vice chairman at Rakuten Travel said at a press conference today that the OTA site currently mainly serves outbound Japanese travelers. In other words, after tying up with hotels in Southeast Asia, the content and bookings are available in Japanese to the bulk of Rakuten Travel’s customers. But as time passes, Rakuten Travel will promote itself within Southeast Asia to acquire users here.

Though Rakuten had to pull out of its e-commerce venture in China, its Rakuten Travel operations (through an acquisition of Etpass in 2011) seem to be doing well. Sales for Etpass were dipping until Rakuten took over in 2011. Yamada says that Etpass is a good company but was just having trouble with its management. Besides the typical SEM and SEO execution, Yamada also said that Qunar, the Baidu-owned travel meta-search site, helps bring in a lot of sales.

When it comes to expansion, I think Rakuten is better off working alone or acquiring companies to set up its base. Tarad and Etpass are working okay. But its joint ventures in China (with Baidu) and Indonesia (with MNC Media) have dissolved, leaving the company with the challenge of regrouping and rethinking its strategy in those regions.

Global outsourcing online marketplace Freelancer, which connects people to freelance jobs posted worldwide, is making an effort to bring in more members from Malaysia with a localized language feature that launched just last week. The company is looking to assist with the country’s eight year plan in catalysing growth and income of its SMEs with jobs offered on the site. At the moment, 97 percent all business establishments in Malaysia are SMEs.

There are around 50,000 Freelancer users in Malaysia, and regional manager for Asia, Evan Tan, told us that they plan to increase that to 300,000 by next year. The company aspires to do this by launching more features targeted towards the Malaysian market, such as the recently rolled-out Bahasa Malaysia language service.

Most of Freelancer’s jobs come from English speaking countries like the UK, the US, and Australia. As English is a widely spoken language in Malaysia, a lot of Malaysians are well able to use the site’s features effectively already. Internet penetration in Malaysia is good at about 60.7 percent, or around 17.7 million people being online. Evan adds:

We’re supporting the Malaysian government’s goal to become a high income, advanced nation by 2020, by making top talent as well as high-quality work accessible to Malaysians.

Before stepping into Malaysia, Freelancer expanded to neighboring Indonesia last year, rolling out localized language support for the country. It has seen significant growth of over 60 percent in only three months, with more than 100,000 Indonesian users currently.