Indonesian startup Jualio lets you sell directly to your fans and followers

Two-month-old Indonesian startup Jualio is a dashboard for social commerce. Sellers can link their social media accounts and push products to their followers and fans. Buying an item is quick and easy: buyers click on the link, enter the necessary personal information, and choose a payment method. There’s not even a login process.

Jualio’s target audience is very specific, says founder Nukman Luthfi. The startup is looking at social media accounts with a large number of followers or fans that don’t traditionally sell anything, such as celebrities or media outlets.

Tested by Metro TV

“Jualio is their way of monetizing their social media channels,” says Luthfi. Jualio’s first high-profile partnership is with Metro TV, a local 24-hour news channel. Popular Metro TV talk show host Najwa Shihab is currently selling her book through Jualio. Followers can purchase it via a link on Metro TV’s Twitter channel, which has more than 7 million followers. The promotion has only been going on for a few days, so there aren’t any sales numbers yet.

This is what Jualio looks like in a Twitter stream: Mata Najwa retweets Metro TV’s promotion of her book.

Promotions are not limited to physical items. “Metro TV has things like books and merchandizing,” Luthfi says, “but they also have event tickets and digital content. That’s why Jualio lets its users sell digital products with the same principle. Buyers can pay for digital products with their phone credit.”

Luthfi says he has been working on the idea for a year, before incorporating two months ago and launching a beta version of Jualio last week. The team consists only of three people: Luthfi as CEO, Fahmi Bafdhal as CTO and one social media manager.

Advantage over marketplaces like Tokopedia

“Big marketplaces like Tokopedia, they spend a lot of money on advertising because they need to tell customers where to shop online,” says Luthfi. “But people are active on social media, they stay longer on [those platforms] than any other media. And brands already have their target audience on social media channels.”

With Jualio, Luthfi wants to create a tool to turn the social space into a place for transactions – without the need to lure followers to an ecommerce shop. By abandoning the ecommerce model, which requires creating a profile or even searching for the product in a store where it drowns among other options, shoppers have a more direct line to making a purchase.

Jualio’s links lead to a single-product landing page, with no other call to action. Corporate accounts on Jualio can customise the look of this landing page and can control which payment channels they accept. On the back end, Jualio has an analytics dashboard that tells sellers how their channels are performing.

The system integrates well with Twitter, Facebook profiles, and Facebook Fanpages, and the team is working on a way to connect with Instagram.

Invite-only for another year