BukaLapak, E-Commerce With Traditional Approach

Copywriting is indeed an important part of a service, the way you talk to specific target audience can help boost the experience you’re trying to give them, like Woot does. BukaLapak is one of that e-commerce sites that uses a more traditional approach of talking with their customer. One of that key value of traditional market in Indonesia is bargaining, the one thing you can’t do when shopping on a modern market.

It’s a small feature, but it really differentiate themselves from the other big e-commerce players. Too bad it’s not exactly a strong key point, their competitors can always add the Bargain feature and they’re left off with nothing. This factor has to be taken into account in the competition scene for Indonesian startups, most of them are not aware of this kind of situation.

Continue reading BukaLapak, E-Commerce With Traditional Approach

Is It Shopping Season Already? OgahRugi Giving Away Discounts

Discounts and daily deals website seems to be picking up in Indonesia as well as the rest of the world. A phenomenon started by Groupon and its social buying features. We’ve seen a growing number of e-commerce websites and discounts websites, but none of the tried to combine both concept in one website until now.

OgahRugi is that one site that tries to combine both daily deals / discounts and e-commerce with a twist of social features (which is practically mandatory). The bad thing about it, is they haven’t done anything innovative with both features, they just simply combine them together and there’s no bridge between two services. They seem to add e-commerce platform as a complimentary feature and maybe a source of income while they’re prepping a viable business model they can use as primary income.

Continue reading Is It Shopping Season Already? OgahRugi Giving Away Discounts

Fanesia, Supposedly A Groupon Clone for Indonesia

Another startup ready to launch within 24 days since today, it’s a daily deal site called Fanesia. Founded by an ex-Tokobagus employee, Fanesia supposedly deliver daily deals for customers similar like Groupon.

On their Facebook page, they invited users to get discounts at their favorite restaurants, spa and fashion items which is one of the most popular items searched on the internet. This set them under the shades of with other big players like AdaDiskon and CariPromo without a niche strength of their own. In this area, you can survive when you focus / target specific people who’s willing to pay more online.

However, this kind of startup is a big bright star in the eyes of early stage investors remembering they have solid business plan and easier to scale then any other service-base startups. No news on whether Fanesia raised funding from investors, will definitely keep an eye following them around.

Kemana.com Secretly (and Finally) Launched!

Kemana.com has been building buzz since early this year and on the website they counting down to May 2010 as their launching date. By the end of May, they changed the frontpage and now they claiming April 2010 as their launching date. After June 2010, they’re still not launching anything so i lost interest, until today when i randomly visit their website and there they are, launched.

Kemana.com was founded by Chris Benz (pictured left), an entrepreneur from New York who also founded CraftNetwork.com back in 2005. The reason they operate Kemana.com in Indonesia? I have no idea, but whatever it is it’s not because there’s no competition here. We have plenty of competition in the e-commerce/marketplace area, actually we have too many of them, but then again there’s no such thing as having too many competition.

Continue reading Kemana.com Secretly (and Finally) Launched!

Telkomsel Breaks The Device Boundary with Appzone

Telkomsel, one of the biggest telco provider in Indonesia today announced Appzone. As the name suggests, Appzone is an application marketplace where Telkomsel subscriber can download various apps regardless the devices they’re using. Appzone provides applications for Blackberries, iPhones and Java-based apps for Nokia and Sony-Ericsson users. So every Telkomsel users from any devices will have the privileges to enjoy these apps.

Applications showcased on Appzone now not only consist of free apps, some apps are also came with a price tag between IDR 8000 – 20.000, which is very affordable.

This is another alternative for Telkomsel subscriber other than the app offered by their manufacturer like iPhone App Store, Blackberry App World, or Android Marketplace. In terms of competition with other app-market, it is less likely to compete with other marketplace since it’s very exclusive and so far it didn’t gain enough traction from independent developers. It is most likely that Telkomsel have a deal with their software developer partners to develop mobile apps for AppZone.

Continue reading Telkomsel Breaks The Device Boundary with Appzone

LintasBerita’s New (And Weird) Ad Unit

LintasBerita, a social bookmarking site with huge traffic secretly rolled out their new partnership with Krazymarket, a local niche e-commerce site. The partnership is actually just a common banner advertising with a unique treatment.

Based on the ui of lintasBerita, the Krazymarket ad looks like a new independent channel based on the tab-like ad shape. This is a bit deceiving for visitors like who clicked on the ad because i thought it was a channel for e-commerce or some sort. This is possibly the lamest ad unit i’ve seen so far.

It would be better for both party to do a more in-depth partnership to promote Krazymarket’s stuff on the website based on the similar visitor characteristics of both site. People visiting LintasBerita to find weird (or unique) news while Krazymarket sells unique stuff and also antiques.

LintasBerita is one of the biggest website in Indonesia in terms of traffic and engagement where every website that gets in the frontpage get a spike reference from LintasBerita, similar to The Digg Effect.