Shopback Expands Business to Australia and Build Two New R&Ds

Shopback, a Singapore-based cashback aggregator startup, announces expansion to Australia as the 7th operational area after receiving fresh funding of Rp338 billion led by Credit Saiso. The new office is planned to be functioned in the second quarter of 2018.

"We prefer Australia because it's mature enough and its good appreciation of e-commerce. The number of transaction there has reached three times higher than Indonesia with only 25 million population," explained Indra Yonathan, Shopback Indonesia's Co-Founder and Country Head on Wednesday (1/24)

Besides Australia, Shopback also added two new R&Ds in Vietnam and Taiwan. The new offices will support Shopback's central R&D in Singapore in developing groups of technology and product in the future.

For Yonathan, the team selected Vietnam and Taiwan to be R&D offices because demographically, the engineering talents are superb. It is what Indonesia has not achieved. Later, the experts are expected to share the knowledge for local talents.

"The funding will not be used for massive marketing. We want to evolve by creating new products. By these means, a large engineering team is neecessary. Should be increased by two or three times."

Grouply, Shopback has operating in six countries namely Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan and Thailand. Indonesia has become the biggest contributor with 30%-40% in group.

In total, Shopback has partnered up with 1,300 e-commerce players. It has reached 3.2 million users, with total purchasing of SG$22 million per month. The site has been visited for more than 5 million times in a month and its app has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times.

Shopback Indonesia's business target

Yonathan continued, by the end of this year, they targeted the whole business growth to increase by three times. Therefore, the company will conduct more marketing activities aggresively by giving some incentive to those who successfully refer to new users.

This refferal strategy is proven to be more effective. Considering the company's research results, Shopback has currently using word-of-mouth marketing strategy. Besides, it's going to expand partnership with brands and targeting SMEs on e-commerce platform.

"We want to reach around 1000 online SMEs to be our partners."

The new features of Shopback Indonesia includes price comparison of online tansportation, discount coupon aggregation and top-up balance price.

Within two years operation, the business growth is claimed to reach 300% up and given approximately Rp60 billion cashback to its users. In total, Shopback has 1.8 million users and 180 e-commerce.

– Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian