A founder’s vision to boost the Philippines’ ecommerce scene

QuadX founder and CEO Dino Araneta. / Photo credit: QuadX

(Additional reporting by Nathaniel Fetalvero)

For four years, Dino Araneta was the president and chief operating officer of LBC Express, a leading logistics and money remittance company in the Philippines. But later on, he realized that running the company’s operations made it difficult for him to implement ideas and strategies of his own that could directly impact the market.

“There were too many day-to-day activities, so I left that post,” says Araneta, who stepped down in 2014.

That same year, he completed the Owner/President Management Executive Education program at Harvard Business School Executive Education, where he learned to expand his leadership skills and vision. Soon after, Araneta launched TheShop, an ecommerce marketplace that would go head-to-head against similar regional players that were entering the Philippine market at the time.

But he quickly came up against a tough reality: competing against the likes of Alibaba’s Lazada wouldn’t be easy.

“I was in over my head, competing with the likes of Lazada head-on, and thought that things would just go smoothly,” recalls Araneta.

Failing and learning

While TheShop provided Filipino vendors with a platform to market their products, Araneta and his team realized that they wanted more than just to provide an avenue aimed at reaching consumers.

“The truth was that all these merchants wanted everything done for them,” he observes. On top of the marketplace, TheShop’s clients demanded delivery services and the ability to provide various payment methods for their products – something the company was ill-prepared to accommodate at the time.

Rather than give up in the face of impending bankruptcy, Araneta decided to “rebuild everything from scratch,” shutting down the marketplace and pivoting into providing logistics solutions instead. The revamped business is now called QuadX.

Responding to feedback from TheShop merchants to address the pain points of Filipino sellers, QuadX launched CheckMeOut in 2016. The service gives sellers a convenient way to schedule deliveries and offer a wide range of payment preferences, including cash on delivery (COD). Previously, only major e-tailers like Lazada had the means to offer the COD option.

Empowering small businesses

Since only 1.9 percent of Filipinos own a credit card, ecommerce businesses that don’t offer COD miss out on a huge potential customer base.

This is why QuadX built CheckMeOut to enable microsellers – individuals who market their goods primarily on social media rather than on a dedicated website – to offer COD and reach a larger client base.

Using its pick-up and drop-off services, QuadX runs the entire logistics process for microsellers, saving them time so they can focus on more important aspects of their business.

Photo credit: belchonock / 123RF

“We level the ground for who can be a businessman,” says Araneta. “Now anyone who wants to sell online can do it easily.”

Additionally, Araneta and his team started working with bigger ecommerce players like Shopee, which entered the Philippine market in 2015, and tapped QuadX for most of its logistics process.

Thanks to Shopee’s bulk orders and smaller ones from microseller clients, QuadX saw increased revenue, which in turn could be used for the company’s growth and development.

“It was the perfect marriage between us and Shopee,” he adds.

CheckMeOut now has more than 92,000 merchants selling to over 7 million buyers in the Philippines and Araneta credits the platform for saving QuadX.

Continued expansion

QuadX has other tools focused on pushing the Philippines’ ecommerce industry forward.

While businesses typically need to depend on several companies for the different stages of their logistics process, Araneta says that QuadX “is an all-in-one logistics platform” that provides a whole range of services such as international shipping, mobile payment, and delivery.

“We have six or seven different apps or platforms at the moment out there, including ShippingCart, CheckMeOut, and XPost, among others,” he says.

Its newest app, KaberX, manages over 1,900 couriers that deliver for QuadX users. Riders can book delivery jobs through the app, collect packages from sellers, and bring them to specified drop-off locations according to schedule.

Photo credit: dinozzaver / 123RF

“This is a very big innovation that not only helps the logistics trade as a whole, but provides more jobs as well,” Araneta explains.

Looking forward, Araneta is bullish about the future of the Philippines’ commerce scene and QuadX’s role in it.

“Our main goal is to reshape commerce in the Philippines,” he says. “We plan to run anywhere there is friction, not just in ecommerce but in the entire commerce industry as well.”

As the Philippines’ first customer-centric digital logistics company, QuadX is dedicated to helping Filipino entrepreneurs by providing simple and seamless commerce solutions.

Visit QuadX’s website to learn more about integrating digital logistics processes and payment processes into your ecommerce business.