The under-the-radar ecommerce startup that’s taking Thailand and Malaysia by storm

Chilindo combines an auction model with tight supply chain management to bring affordable goods to consumers.

Imagine starting a company in a foreign country, in an overcrowded space with a business model that has been around for the last few years. Now imagine that company surpassing the older players, widening its customer base, and expanding rapidly to other parts of the region.

That’s what Caspar Bo Jensen and his co-founder Thomas Kjeldgaard have achieved with Chilindo – Southeast Asia’s answer to eBay.

Jensen is an unlikely poster boy for entrepreneurship. “After I graduated from college in Denmark, I started selling all sorts of products – mostly from China – on a Danish version of eBay. We weren’t doing badly but then the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 hit, and I lost a lot of money,” he recalls.

For this economics and law student, the crisis was a game changer. “I went back to work in the corporate sector to recover some of the savings I had lost but didn’t feel comfortable in that setting.”

Jensen continues, “Then, I caught up with some friends from Thailand and became fascinated by the way they talked about the growth of the country, which was completely different to what we were used to hearing while living in Denmark.”

At the time, ecommerce was picking up in Thailand and the rest of Southeast Asia, giving consumers access to goods that were previously out of reach, like imported groceries and trendy cosmetics. Jensen spotted an opportunity, promptly packed his bags, and left for Thailand.

“I had a vision that I would create an ecommerce platform which would serve customers globally from Bangkok,” he says. But after chatting with a friend, he became convinced that ecommerce was about to explode in Thailand. So he decided to service this market instead.

Photo credit: Caspar Bo Jensen

That gamble paid off. A recent study by Google and Temasek found that ecommerce in Southeast Asia is set to grow from US$5.5 billion or less than 1 percent of total retail sales in 2015, to US$88 billion or 6.4 percent of all retail sales by 2025. Chilindo was officially born in 2013.

One of its key differentiators was that it combined ecommerce with “gamification,” using a pure auction model where all products start from just THB 1 (US$0.03). There’s no reserve price, that is, the lowest price the seller is willing to accept for an item.

“We believe the auction model is a lot more engaging and customers get to bid what they feel the products are worth, rather than being tricked into buying high-priced items by sellers. Shopping is, in many ways, about being entertained. Getting the best deal is obviously a big part of it. So, we believe that the auction model is one way of making shopping fun,” says Jensen.

Efficient supply chain

Funding and the future