Doku Launches MyShortCart, a Shopping Cart for Social Media Merchants

Indonesian payment company Doku on Friday announced its latest push into consumer transaction by launching MyShortCart, an independent shopping cart which is aimed at individual online sellers as well as small online stores. MyShortCart accepts payments through online transfers, Doku Wallet and credit cards.

Following the launch of Doku Wallet earlier this year, MyShortCart is Doku's second initiative to own the online consumer payment market which is still dominated by individual sellers through the use of social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and BlackBerry Messenger rather than the big e-commerce players.

MyShortCart provides a practical and efficient way for people to receive payments over items that they sell online with the additional trust provided by a certified financial institution. While people often prefer cash on delivery or bank transfers, there's a greater risk of fraud that these more traditional methods carry.

"MyShortCart is our next solution after Doku Wallet", says Doku CEO Thong Sennelius. "(The service) provides practicality and benefit especially for Netpreneurs in any social media platform and the most important thing is the guarantee of safe transaction for both seller and buyer. This will revolutionize the online trading system that currently still rely on transfers and COD".

Head of business development at Doku, Dhenu Wiarsandi, explained that MyShortCart is primarily aimed at individuals and small businesses who regularly trades online through social media channels. "There is a significant number of individuals who set up shop on BlackBerry Messenger, Facebook, Instagram, and practically all of them employ primarily bank transfers and cash on delivery. These are largely unsecured and unsafe transactions so we want to raise the trust level among the parties concerned".

The service is presented as a shopping cart, one which operates exactly like any other online shopping cart except it's not provided by the merchant. It supports various methods of payment including bank transfers, credit card payment, as well as Doku Wallet. Individuals who have entered the product details on MyShortCart will be provided with a unique URL which they can use to distribute anywhere from social networks, messaging services, websites, and even email.

"Merchants or sellers must have a government issued ID number and a tax file number (NPWP) before they can conduct transactions through our service", MyShortCart product lead Imam Akbar Hadikusumo explained. Unfortunately this means individuals who have neither will not be able to take advantage of this service.

"It's part of our commitment to provide secure transactions and unfortunately that means you have to be at least 17 years old". The Indonesian government issues ID cards for citizens that have reached the age of 17 to deal with all official matters. MySortCart also employs escrow and fraud detection mechanisms on top of personal ID numbers, to significantly reduce fraud risks.

Wiarsandi said that MyShortCart isn't a marketplace but it's easy to think of it that way if you haven't used the service. What keeps this from being a marketplace is that there is no master page that shows all of your listed items, only individual ones for the purposes of processing payment.

Currently MyShortCart is already being used by a small number of companies and organizations who have been participating in the trial period which dates back to January of this year. Among them are site builder Pixtem, charity organization Dompet Dhuafa, female fashion stores Belowcepek and Lost Mannequin, Asian Brain, and No Designs.

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