Yahoo Taiwan aims to launch online-to-offline ecommerce by year’s end

“Online-to-offline” (O2O) might be a cringe-worthy expression, but that’s not stopping ecommerce firms from embracing what it stands for. Yahoo Taiwan has plans to launch an O2O platform by the end of this year, according to a report from Taiwan’s China Times.

Though details on the matter remain scarce, a representative from Yahoo Taiwan’s mobile division told the paper that it would likely build out a feature on top of the company’s existing mobile commerce app. Users that browse product listings, for example, might receive notifications telling them that a particular item is for sale at a nearby brick-and-mortar outlet.

Yahoo Taiwan’s mobile ecommerce app currently ports over listings from its chaoji shangcheng ecommerce branch and adds a few personalization features. Most vendors are small businesses or licensed distributors. To date, Yahoo Taiwan claims more than 450,000 people have downloaded the app, and reports that almost 40 percent of the branch’s transactions come from mobile. The company has yet to release a standalone app its widely-used peer-to-peer ecommerce site.

While Yahoo has always retained full ownership of its Taiwan branch, the local team has historically marched to the beat of its own drum compared to its peers in Asia (excluding Japan and Australia, where Yahoo operates as joint ventures). Its dominance in ecommerce is perhaps its greatest success – Yahoo maintains market leadership in online sales for Taiwan, according to data from Euromonitor cited by the American Chamber of Commerce. On mobile, the company looks set to face competition from Line, which will launch a peer-to-peer ecommerce app in Taiwan in November. The island likely sits as Line’s busiest market when measured for penetration, with 17 million registered users among a population of 23 million people.

(Source: China Times)

Editing by Steven Millward; top image via Flickr user koadmunkee