The Story and Strategy behind Tokopedia

Tokopedia, the popular Indonesian e-marketplace is one of the most promising start-ups in Asia. In its initial two years, the start-up failed to receive funding from investors. But that didn’t deter William Tanuwijaya and his team. They kept faith in the idea.

It was only until February 2009 that Tokopedia received its first funding from PT Indonusa Dwitama, and in the following August, their website was launched. Tokopedia grew and attracted more investors’ interest. On March 2010, William and team got their second funding from Singapore-based Venture Capital firm, East Ventures.

Their journey continues… So what’s their next move? Find out below as Co-founder Tanuwijaya shares his story and strategy with us.

1) Hi William, thanks for your time. What inspired you and your team to create Tokopedia?

The idea first came up in 2007. At that time, there was no proper online marketplace Indonesia. Instead, everyone used website like online forums, social networking sites and even blogs as platforms to buy and sell stuff online. Those websites then became what is known as a classified-ads e-commerce model in Indonesia.

However, those websites weren’t created specifically for e-commerce purpose. We saw two problems:

a. Scalability

Some difficulties might occur in managing product catalog and order monitoring for serious sellers with a lot of item classifications. The platform back isn’t build for long term growth.

b. Security

Indonesia didn’t have a good online payment system that processes the transaction only after the buyers had made their payment. On the other hand, it is also highly possible that sellers won’t process the order, even after the buyers made their payments.

Both issues are apparent problems in the online marketplace. Tokopedia is now the solution. We hold the payments made by the buyers, and only transfer them to the sellers only after the buyers receive their items.

2) So, what are the statistics now? How many users, traffic and profit?

Right now we have more than 7,800 active shops and 75,000 registered members. We are visited by 700,000-800,000 unique visitors per month. Our monthly transactions in January reached IDR 2.6 Billion (291,200 US dollars).