Well, China has 100+ Groupon clones and Malaysia is picking up as well on its own scale. Group buying sites are popping out lately in Malaysia. It's a bit of deja-vu like many were attempting to build a local social network site some years back...
It was the first time in history that a Malaysian company made headlines at TechCrunch last December. Friendster, the granddaddy of social networks has been acquired by MOL Global, a Malaysian e-commerce (payment) company...
Generally, Malaysians are skeptical or reluctant to shop online due to security concerns among many. We lack smart consumers, as suggested by Danny Foo. Air Asia did a great job in our e-commerce education. Desperately in need of bargain air tickets? Learn how to shop online and brace yourself by entering the credit card numbers...
Do you have the habit of shopping at foreign online store, especially those from the west? I do, like many others, looking for bargains, stuffs that are special or not easily available here. I do have an extra small habit though...
Well, this post is all about charts and figures. Read on to get a glimpse of e-commerce outlook in selected countries of Asia Pacific. Hopefully, you will get a rough idea on those markets that you are not particularly familiar with...
Blogshop seems to be an unique trend booming only in Singapore and Malaysia. Perhaps, many Singaporeans or Malaysians are accustomed to browse and navigate around blogshop but certainly not me (some might agree with me on this)...
Q: You were actively involved in social advertising business, namely YouthAsia (Says.my) all this while. What makes you shifted your attention to e-commerce - group buying business?
A: Youth Asia started in belief of using the internet to bring the collective power of young people together. We actually started with www.theyouthfestival.com -- where we used internet tools to bring together 88,000 young Malaysians on-ground to organize + participate in a fully by youth for youth festival, which turned out to be the largest ever youth fest ever. Then we started YouthSays.com (now known as Says.my) to gather their collective voices to represent them through research + social media platforms. So it was a natural progression for us to explore something related to e-commerce. When we saw the Groupon model (during its infancy -- first 9 months) we thought WOW -- from The Point to Groupon -- collecting people together to get discounts - that sounded like something we would love to do! Its almost in our DNA to replicate it in Malaysia.
