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Organiser:  Selangor Information Technology and E-Commerce Council (SITEC)
Class: 8th EC Class of 2015
Title: E-Commerce Platforms (Chinese)
Date: 10 July 2015
Time: 2PM 
Venue: SDCC

After the soft launch of Selangor Digital Cretive Centre (SDCC) by Selangor state government on early July, the agency organized an e-commerce class on July 10 and invited few industry players including Youbeli, 11Street and Webshaper to share the current trend of e-commerce and also their experience in the industry.

The forum was kick started by MyStartr CEO Goh Boon Peng’s sharing on the current outlook of Malaysia’s e-commerce and also brief history of the industry. He says there are currently many traditional sectors that have yet to explore the possibilities into e-commerce, though the nation has already accumulated a total number of 19 million people using the internet, comprising 63% of the total population, while online buyer community comprises of 10.5 million people, with the most active buyers age ranged from 26 to 35.

The history of Malaysian e-commerce can be traced back to 1998. The launch of Lelong.my has indicated a new page for the industry. But Lim says that the first time Malaysia’s consumers shown active trading was in year 2001, when Airasia aggressively promoted its online flight ticket booking system. Then in 2011, Groupon, RAkuten, Zalora and Lazada continue to ignite the sparks among youngster to shop online. As for this year, other online shopping platforms are also joining the game, where Logon, Gemfive and 11Street were introduced at the same time.    

He adds, the next five to ten years will be a critical period for local e-commerce to develops, the success of the e-commerce platforms is a good new for entrepreneurs, because they need the assistance of these platforms to be triumphant.

Malaysia’s maiden e-commerce platform, Youbeli was formed in 2009. The co-founder of the platform Andy Lay says when he observed the smaller businesses were forced to close down due to their incapability to compete with the giant players in the market, it came across his  mind to start an e-commerce platform, hoping it can helps these businesses to be able to compete in another dimension and survive. 

Confucius had a saying: I would like to give comfort to the aged, trust to my friends and nurturance to the young. By holding on to the same principle, Youbeli is created to enable the traditional businesses to survive, give trust to customers and nurturing the young online entrepreneurs.

He adds, Youbeli has  several features including customer service, orders taking, orders status, analysis of invoice, shopping points accumulation, after-sale technical service and official website.

He also encourages the businesses to not be afraid to compete with other players, as the competition is just as same whether if it is online or offline.  

The founder of Webshaper Adrian Oh also emphasizes that e-commerce industry is in the midst of flourishing. “We saw that Taylor College registered averagely 700 packages daily. I believe this number will only increase as it is the current trend.”  

However, he admits setting up a webpage will face the issue of low viewership in the initial stage, thus, the existence of Webshaper is to build a bridge to where the traffic are.  

He says, Webshaper has quite a number of customers that have successfully showed tremendous result in e-commerce, with the revenue hitting more than million ringgit annually. There are also some of these successful entrepreneurs that have gotten their story to be written under the company’s publication known as Malaysian E-commerce Success Story.  

Korea’s biggest online shopping platform, 11Street, has set its foothold in Malaysia on April this year. The company seller development manager William Wong states, the company will be providing free facilities and training to the registered sellers.

“Training course shall starts at 2pm every day, mainly in guiding these sellers in how to use the basic functions of the platform, and also provide other courses such as online marketing course at the same time. As for facilities, we are providing studios for our customers to use for product photo-shooting session with the guidance of professional photographers, with no charges required,” he adds.

Wong also says, the company has invested over million in operating costs in order to create traffic for the platform. “We progressively take efforts in promotion and advertising activities. We have invited the famous Korean artist, Lee Min Ho to be the spoke person of the platform, and it successfully attracted more than 5000 people during the official launch.

Wong says the platform is currently offering free registration for sellers, eyeing to increase its sellers to 11,000.