Daniel Tumiwa Tells Why Multiply is Best for Indonesian E-Commerce

Daniel Tumiwa, the country manager of Multiply Indonesia, kicked off the “Innovation and Creativity” seminar in Jakarta a couple of days ago as one of the event’s speakers (Steve Wozniak also spoke). Most of his talk wasn’t really about creativity and innovation, and instead it was mostly about e-commerce and Multiply self-promotion in my opinion. But for those of you who are interested in what the company is doing in Indonesia, here are some highlights:

• Multiply currently has 2.4 million members and 7 million unique visitors.
• There are 85,000 stores and sellers inside Multiply today.
• There are 2,000 more sellers and 75,000 new products every month.
• Multiply offers products from a total of 17 main categories (level 1), 130 sub-categories (level 2), and 600 sub-sub-categories (level 3). Nirmala from Multiply then added via email that Multiply’s strongest categories at the moment are Clothing & Accessories, Beauty & Health, and Baby.

Daniel also said that there is about $400 million worth of offline transactions in Indonesia every year. That is probably one of the main reasons why Multiply moved its office to Indonesia as it looks forward to bringing that number into online transactions.

The numbers represent good progress for Multiply in the last month. It shows that the total registered members grew by 100,000 in the last month, and we can assume that these new members are mostly buyers rather than sellers based on the seller total from last month.

Daniel also gave some comparisons between Multiply and its competitors. Regarding Kaskus, although it is an Indonesian pioneer in e-commerce, Daniel believes that Kaskus is not the place for merchants to build their brands. He said that if you want to build your brand, you can’t do that with threads. Daniel also compared Multiply with competitor Toko Bagus, saying that people at Multiply mostly sells new products, not second-hand products like the ones you read on small newspaper ads, referring to Toko Bagus.

[Photo: the-marketeers.com]