Tokopedia Releases Live Shopping Feature Tokopedia Play

Entering the Ramadan season amid pandemic, Tokopedia launches some innovations to facilitate all the users. The innovations including additional feature for sellers, Tokopedia Play, and Live Shopping feature.

Tokopedia's AVP of Product, Priscilla Anais said, Ramadan season is identic with increasing transaction, particularly amid pandemic, online shopping becomes an alternative to minimize the outbreak. In order to keep the local business, the company has released some innovations to boost sellers' productivity.

"We also present a new content experience for buyers through Tokopedia Play and the convenience of direct shopping through the Buy Direct feature," he said on a video conference, yesterday (4/27).

In addition to those three, Tokopedia also added specialty food and beverages (F&B) product curation that were most sought during the pandemic and Ramadan season. The F&B category classifies prepared foods, frozen foods, and snacks. This curation aims to make it easier for the seller to meet with potential buyers with maximum browsing speed.

"During Covid-19, we created a special page so that consumers can find products for sale closest to their location. "

The increase in transactions during the pandemic at Tokopedia is claimed to be quite exponential, both from the purchase and the number of sellers. Anais was reluctant to spare the details. However, she gave an illustration of Tokopedia's last year sales of around 5 million, while this year it was 7.8 million.

She predicted the increase was triggered by the number of businesses that were forced to close physical stores and limit operations due to the pandemic. Eventually, they slowly shifted their business from offline to online.

"In fact, the growth is exponential. We experienced a dramatic rise in new sellers during the Covid-19 period. Most are offline sellers who migrate online."

In terms of the categories of widely purchased products, the increase happened to be personal care and health, entertainment products, and products to support work and study from home.

As explained, from 7.8 million sellers who joined, more than half manage the business through the application. They market more than 250 million products to more than 90 million monthly active users of Tokopedia.

Three new innovations

Tokopedia Seller App

Tokopedia has made a number of transformations on specific applications for sellers to increase their productivity. This application has been released since last year, available in the Android version only. The additional feature named the quick reply chat feature to make it easier for the seller to reply to the message from the buyer via notification, without having to open the application.

Next, a weekly summary of sales and orders that makes it easy for sellers to see sales summary, store performance, orders, and transaction constraints. "Buyers in Indonesia are quite demanding, wanting the message to be quickly returned. We facilitate it for sellers, without having to open the application, "explained Head of Product Seller Platform Nadhira Ayuningtyas.

Furthermore, the shop's homepage can now be personalized according to the seller's needs to make it look attractive. They can display campaigns, superior products, and promotions. "We've added many widgets to the application so that the seller gets priority which activities they should do."

According to Nadhira, sellers who have downloaded the Tokopedia Seller application no longer need to download the main application. Nevertheless, the new application is available for the Android version and immediately follows the iOS version. The application has been developed since the end of last year.

Tokopedia Play

The second innovation is Tokopedia Play to provide a live shopping experience or live shopping and interact with content creators. This concept is not new to other e-commerce companies. As a differentiator, Tokopedia makes live streaming shows by autoplay by adjusting the quality of the buyer's network at that time.

"We've come up with solving consumer problems. We place Tokopedia Play on the home page to make it easily visible. We present technology by autoplay, when connected to Wi-Fi, the streaming content will automatically play. When the signal is bad, only the banner will appear," Tokopedia Play's Head of Product Cynthia Limin said.

Direct Purchase

The last one, a Direct Purchase feature is to speed up the shopping process with just one click. Payment and shipping methods are automatically recommended by the Tokopedia system according to the preferences or habits of each buyer. This feature is still in the testing phase for some users.

Tokopedia Deo Nathaniel's Head of Product Purchase Platform explains, this feature is more directed to accommodate impulsive buyers and only purchase one product. If more than one product in one basket will be directed to the method as usual.

"Impulsive buyers are loyal users who are familiar with checkout flow at Tokopedia. They used to use the same payment method. To improve their experience, we created a Direct Purchase feature. "

–Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian