Continued from SMilDS.com - Smile Everyday?


You must be wondering how they define E-Commerce 4.0, right?



To me, the self-coined term is not much different from a typical e-commerce in the cloud. You get the standard e-commerce features like shopping cart, payment gateway, inventory control, order fulfillment, logistic tracking, delivery and customer service.

Perhaps, the only differentiation here is the cross selling engine which they bragged about, for being the first of its kind in the world? Cross sell here means, as a merchant, you can sell other merchant's product at your store and get a commission from there.

Not only that, they also coined the term "Blue Tail", which means Blue Ocean Strategy + The Long Tail. ;)

Here's a recap on their super ambitious plan:



According to their CIO, SMilDS.com has been launched in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Philippines. Their immediate target markets including China, South Africa, Australia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. On the contrary, even Rakuten seems to be cautious on expanding to new markets, but then that is Japanese though, being as cautious as ever.

Perhaps, you might have heard of Rakuten University. Interestingly, SMilDS is also having their own SMilDS University to help merchants operate and manage their online stores. I guess that is critical since they are to market this platform to SME / SMIs, graduates from universities / colleges(?) and retrenched workers(?).

So, how much do the graduates or retrenched workers need to fork out? :P

According to their FAQs, it is RM 5,000 for the "startup fee". But, from what I heard is different though. It would cost around RM 4,000 for two years, and merchants can utilize this fund to market their products in the shopping mall. Oh yes, there will be a SMilDS shopping mall coming next month, aggregating and promoting products from their merchants.

At the moment, local merchants can only register URL parked under their subdomain (*.smild.biz). Therefore, you can roughly google on what kind of stores and products are in place. You can also have a quick glance on the platform via their user guide.