Doku Targets Social Commerce in Indonesia With New MyShortCart

Standing in the middle holding the yellow board is the CEO of Doku, Thong Sennelius

Indonesian e-payment gateway Doku has launched a new service aimed at blogshops, Facebook shops, and all kinds of social commerce businesses. Called MyShortCart, it’s a cart and check-out system for social commerce that’s integrated with Doku Payment. Online shoppers can pay with credit cards, Doku Wallet, or local ATM transfers.

Basically, small businesses will need to sign up to MyShortCart. After their account has been verified, they can start to input their products into the virtual cart and then each product will need to be verified again by the MyShortCart team. After that, each product will be given an online link.

Putting a shopping trolley into Facebook

Merchants will still keep their regular product listings in their blogshops or Facebook shops and will put the new MyShortCart link in the description of each of those products. When a shopper clicks the link, he or she will be directed to MyShortCart and the buyer will be prompted with a shopping cart. The buyer then needs to complete their profile first before they can choose a payment method inside the service. Once they have done so, a notification will be sent to both the buyer and the seller.

The downside of the experience is that sellers will need to provide a tax-payer code to become a verified merchant. This is particularly a problem because most social e-commerce merchants in Indonesia choose social commerce – rather than normal online marketplaces like Rakuten – because they are not registered. They did mention that they may allow sellers without tax-payer codes if they can provide MyShortCart with a copy of an electric or telephone bill after the seller has contacted MyShortCart team first. Doku said that such scenario is a “special case”.

Doku claims to be the first to provide such a service in Indonesia. Currently it has more than 100 merchants using the service. We spoke to Imam Akbar Hadikusumo, division head of Doku MyShortCart, and asked him about the possibility of MyShortCart becoming another online marketplace, but he explained that they won’t pursue such a strategy. He said that Doku will first focus on building the confidence and trust of Indonesian consumers in the relatively new online shopping experience.

We profiled Doku last month and learnt that the service has processed over $1.1 billion in transactions in the past six years.

(Editing by Steven Milward)