Is the Alibaba of Indonesia living up to its lofty ambitions?

John Riady, director of Indonesia’s Lippo Group, announces the launch of MatahariMall.

It’s the burden of being famous. You’ll be hounded by paparazzi and your secrets will make headlines. Your parents and friends will be convinced you will make it big, and so will the public. If there’s a business equivalent to this situation, that would be the MatahariMall.

The ecommerce mega-venture is an offshoot of one of Indonesia’s wealthiest families, the Riadys. They own Lippo Group, a conglomerate that includes real-estate development companies and other large scale holdings such as Siloam Hospitals and the Matahari department stores.

A quiet entrance wasn’t an option for MatahariMall. Instead, it came guns blazing, with Lippo’s bold claims to have committed US$500 million into building Indonesia’s “number one ecommerce company’. The Riadys would stop at nothing short of creating the “Alibaba of Indonesia.” The first announcement was made in February 2015. The site went live in September that year.

Each step of the new online store’s development was scrutinized with eagle eyes by the local tech community, but even so, many aspects of its operations remain shrouded in mystery.

For example, the US$500 million funding announcement – the one that positioned MatahariMall as the best-funded ecommerce company in the archipelago – has come into question (more on this later). Little is known about the team’s formation and its current financial performance.

Building the team

One person with answers to those questions is MatahariMall’s chief product officer Goh Yiping. She’s “patient zero,” the first member of an all-stars group of ecommerce veterans that now occupies MatahariMall’s executive suite.

Goh Yiping at MatahariMall’s office in Jakarta.

She came into that role through an acquisition. In 2010, Yiping and her brother Wayne set up a group deals aggregator called AllDealsAsia. Similar deal sites had sprung up in Indonesia and Malaysia around the same time.

But unlike its peers, AllDealsAsia was not immediately swallowed up by international competitors like Groupon or LivingSocial. It remained independent. According to Yiping, AllDealsAsia referred “over S$100 million (US$69.7 million) worth of transaction value” in 2014.

That same year, Yiping told Tech In Asia, she was approached by the Lippo Group with an offer. The Riadys weren’t only interested in acquiring AllDealsAsia’s business. The powerful business family, already a nodding acquaintance for Yiping, wanted her on board.

Yiping became one of the co-founders at MatahariMall.

A Singaporean with a humble background, Yiping was the picture of a hard working serial entrepreneur. She tried to get her first company off the ground at age 22.

Four months in

The Lippo power

Do first, talk later