MAPeMall prepares for battle in Indonesia’s ecommerce war

While Lazada continues to dominate the online retail space in Indonesia, and Lippo Group’s MatahariMall faces a delay until summer, a new player of Moby Dick proportion is loading its guns for the ecommerce battle to come.

Mitra Adiperkasa (MAP) is an Indonesian retail company with a portfolio that includes department stores, fashion brands, sports equipment, food and beverage names, supermarkets, and lifestyle products. MAP has close to 1,800 retail outlets, which contain upward of 150 brands in more than 60 cities across Indonesia. The company employs 23,000 people. It’s also the local franchise holder of well-known global brands such as Starbucks, Zara, Barbie, and Adidas.

MAPeMall is MAP’s ecommerce site that’s set to go live at the beginning of August, and will inevitably compete head-on with Indonesia’s other ecommerce behemoths.

“Actually, our strategy is different from theirs because of the exclusivity of our brands,” explains MAPeMAll’s ecommerce marketing head Jasmina Dewi Nashya. “We’re going to make MAPeMall’s shopping experience really unique, and we’re also going to publish inspiring content that will make visitors get more value from the site. […] Also, I think our target customers are more in the middle to high segment, whereas the other sites target more of a majority.”

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aCommerce smells a second dinner

40 people are working on MAPeMall, not including outsourced talent from digital agencies like Mirum (formerly XM Gravity) and ecommerce platform builder Magento. Nashya also confirms that MAPeMall has partnered with aCommerce for logistics, as well as fellow provider Agility. According to Nashya, MAPeMall will soon even move its operation into the same building as aCommerce so as to be closer to the action.

This information is interesting because aCommerce is also the primary enabler for MatahariMall. Having both companies in its portfolio – and likely getting a lot of foot traffic from from bigwig rivals in its office – aCommerce will need to reassure both MAP and Lippo Group that there is in fact an internal Chinese wall in place to prevent conflicts of interest. If all goes well, aCommerce group CEO Paul Srivorakul and Indonesia CEO Adrian Suherman could be well-positioned to sew up the market in Jakarta no matter who wins the ecommerce war.

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Content-driven exclusivity

Nashya says MAPeMall is looking to integrate four main categories: fashion, sports, travel, and kids. According to her, fashion and travel will be the two largest drivers on the site, and MAPeMall’s full deployment will take place in a few separate phases.