Another Local E-Commerce: DuniaVirtual.com

E-Commerce competition in Indonesia is getting more and more crowded and hotter. After the biggest e-commerce in Japan, Rakuten, launched  Rakuten Belanja Online, other e-commerce companies join the competition and this time we are going to talk about DuniaVirtual.com.

DuniaVirtual has several interesting features, one of them is separating seller and buyer specifically, so visitors can find what they want easier. Buyers will get special page and so will sellers. Seller will get a special page (like virtual store) to display their goods.

Upon registration, DuniaVirtual will give you two options, to sign up as buyer or store owner. If we have an account as buyer and we want to sell our stuffs there, we can have our own store without re-registering. To create your own store, simply go to “DV-Account”, and click Store Status to create our store. We can name our store, goods we sell, describe our store, and of course getting URL sub folder. E.g.:  A store called “Samurai” gets URL sub folderhttp://www.duniavirtual.com/samurai. However we cannot change the URL sub folder.

Several facilities from DuniaVirtual, like mention in their official blog are DV Pay, DV Up, DV Point, DV SMS Alert. DV Pay is DuniaVirtual's official payment feature to simplify and secure transactions. DV Up is feature to keep your product at Homepage. DV Point is point reward, every time you sign in and do transactions in DuniaVirtual and can be redeemed as shopping voucher and used to shop in di DV Mall. DV SMS Alert is feature to provide SMS notification if there's any transaction occur.

For payment method – DV Pay, payment will be through PT Dunia Virtual Online's account as escrow, and DuniaVirtual will be the bridge between buyer and seller. If transaction between buyer and DuniaVirtual's account succeeds, DuniaVirtual will notify seller that payment is received and seller can immediately process goods shipment. After buyer receive the goods, they will have to give confirmation to DuniaVirtual, then DuniaVirtual will transfer the payment to seller. A complicated method, but it minimizes fraud to the smallest possibility.

From front-end side DuniaVirtual is quite helpful for visitor, buyer and seller in conducting search or transaction. Although UX and UI is simple, it is easy to comprehend. However if we talk about back-end, DuniaVirtual is not up to their best yet. When I tried their service before writing this article, their website was down 5-10 minutes. If members are increasing and traffice gets higher and higher, will DuniaVirtual ready to face even longer 'server down'?