This year sees the birth of a number of online stores that makeup the country’s virtual fashion district.
While many people dress up to go to a shopping mall, others simply switch on their gadget and click to shop.
During the past 10 years, many Indonesians have been accustomed to check out online forum Kaskus or online shop Toko Bagus to see whether they can find things they want to buy. You can find practically everything on the sites — from gadgets, electronic products, cars, property, fashion items and even pets.
The Facebook and Twitter fever that has hit the country has also encouraged sellers to promote their products on their accounts. Besides using social media, they also create their own virtual shops on blogs and websites.
Now, more and more sellers are making use of e-commerce sites, which facilitate communication between sellers and buyers. These sites serve as a virtual mall where you can shop while having lunch at your office, breast-feeding your baby or after work.
For example, there is Zalora Indonesia, one of the virtual shopping malls that focuses on fashion items. Established in February this year, the fashion portal, with its address zalora.co.id, has been marketing itself on numerous websites in the last six months. It is currently looking toward young, emerging local designers, who will be presenting their creations at the Jakarta Fashion Week 2013, in a bid to get more of a local design flavor in its store.
“We see an opportunity in e-commerce for fashion. There are almost a hundred shopping malls in Jakarta, but due to the traffic jams people only opt to go to the nearest mall in their area. Shopping online saves people time,” Hadi Wenas, one of the two founders of Zalora Indonesia told The Jakarta Post.
He said the peak of transactions occurred during lunch breaks. Some 60 percent of the site’s customers are people who live outside Jakarta, in areas that have limited access to shopping malls. The e-commerce site recently presented an award to one of its customers from Sorong in West Papua, who has spent tens of millions of rupiah in their online store.
Zalora has eight branches in Asia, including Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. The online fashion store has a number of investors, including JPMorgan and Rocket Internet. The latter operates retail online companies, including Zalando in Germany.
Hadi, who previously worked as a programmer in American IT company Oracle, said Zalora Indonesia was monitoring its product and shipment quality by having a 5,000-square-meter warehouse that can store up to 100,000 items. Their customers enjoy free delivery, seven days’ return policy and three kinds of payment methods — cash on delivery (COD), bank payment and credit card.
You don’t like the outfits that arrive at your door? The company guarantees a seven-day cash back if a payment has already been made. Customers living in Jakarta can return a product at the time of receipt or call the company’s customer service to arrange a pickup return schedule for free. Meanwhile, customers outside the capital city who want to return a product need to ship the items themselves.
“People love COD payments because they have no risk,” he said, adding that credit card transactions only accounted for 10 percent of the company’s total transactions.
He said he and his partner, Catherine Sutjahyo, aimed to make the company the largest online fashion store in the country and in Asia. With 240 million residents, half of whom are listed as middle class, he believes the country is a lucrative market for online shopping.
“With increasing traffic jams in Jakarta, we believe that the convenience provided by online shopping will become more popular. People already believe in Kaskus and Facebook shopping models but right now, it is the time for e-commerce sites,” he said.
Other online shopping stores also eye the promising market of online shopping in Indonesia. Fimelashop.com, for example, offers between 30 percent and 70 percent discounts on branded items from previous seasons.
Heri Fikrio, one of the three owners of berbatik.com, said the idea to set up the e-commerce site came after a fellow owner, Jessy Agita, stumbled upon some technical problems when she was using Facebook to market her products.
“E-commerce sites facilitate small sellers, so they can obtain collective branding. We hope to build a gathering site for online batik,” he told the Post over the telephone.
He said he selected the sellers in a bid to ensure that they only offered batik cap (stamped batik) and batik tulis (hand-painted batik). To date, the site, which was established in September this year, has 10 sellers, a figure the company aims to double in the next two weeks.
The future of online shopping seems to be promising, bearing in mind that the country is home to 40 million Internet users. A study by MasterCard Worldwide indicated that 57 percent of Internet users in Indonesia were familiar with the idea of online shopping.
The government is currently preparing a regulation to govern factors, such as payment systems and customer protection, as the Electronic and Information Transaction Law does not touch on the issue.