Tokopedia Celebrates its Third Anniversary, Reveals Some Financials

Tokopedia, one of the oldest players around in Indonesia’s e-commerce industry focusing on the C2C market, is celebrating its third year anniversary today. William Tanuwijaya, co-founder and CEO of Tokopedia, has told us that at the end of the year they are going to move into a larger office and expand the team numbers beyond the current 38 people. The company has been enjoying sigificant expansion after investment from PT Indonusa Dwitama, East Ventures [1], and CyberAgent Ventures last year, and then Netprice this year.

The company, which we interviewed as well last year, has again put up some remarkable numbers despite having few marketing activities compared to its competitors. In total, Tokopedia has processed IDR 151,130,616,899 ($15,908,486) worth of transactions up until now, with the help of its third year result (IDR 115,162,774,221; $12,122,397). William shared that this third year’s growth has really improved significantly: in August 2011 the transaction value per month was only 2.83 billion IDR. But by July 2012 it had reached 18.94 billion IDR. The majority of the sales come from fashion and beauty products (not expensive compared to gadgets), which shows that the company has recorded a lot of transactions.

In its third year, Tokopedia also ranked as the 78th most visited website in Indonesia (according to Alexa), and as William said above this is an impressive achievement that the company achieved organically, without a huge marketing push. William also told me that actually, Tokopedia doesn’t even have any marketing or sales team as of yet.

William told us:

We are very happy with the result so far and be one of startups in Indonesia that consistently growing from year to year. This has fueled us to do even more in achieving our mission as one of the best internet companies in Indonesia. We would like to thank our members, team, investors, and everyone that is involved in making Tokopedia en route to a success.

We have been seeing some other e-commerce startups inside Tokopedia; asked about this, William told us that since its inception Tokopedia has always been an online mall concept and a distribution channel that enables individuals and small business owners to open and maintain their online stores easily. With hiking traffic and visitors, Tokopedia can be another channel for niche e-commerce startups; so far it is doing a trial with 3 sites: Krazymarket, TeknoUp, and DealGoing.

Starting in September 2012, Tokopedia also will close down “Adult” category which previously was added with certain limitations (only members who are older than 21 years old). The site will also hold a campaign against piracy, banning merchants who are selling pirated CD or DVD (software, music, movies, and games). At the same time, Tokopedia has promised to serve its members even better by creating an better mobile-site that can be accessed from any smartphone. Happy birthday to Tokopedia; hopefully it can be one of the success stories that inspires people here in Indonesia!