Shopby Unleashes Social Commerce On Vietnam

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.