Social Commerce a la Mutiply: Shopping, Selling and Sharing

Multiply held a press conference in TransForce - Grand Indonesia, Jakarta on May 18, 2011 to introduce Multiply Commerce to the media and also introduce a variety of services available on their latest platform to facilitate the sellers who use Multiply as a place for online buying and selling.

DailySocial has written various updates and developments in Multiply which also showed their pace in Indonesia, most of their stock acquisition by Naspers Limited (e-commerce company in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa), including the launch of Multiply Commerce that have been reported also in DailySocial.

As we know Multiply alter their strategies of social networking into social commerce. Taking advantage of social networking to sell, there are important features in Multiply Commerce such as Marketplace, Stock Room, Payment Gateway, Shopping Cart and Buyer Protection. Multiply also provides the facility Multiply Promote, Trusted Seller, and Premium Accounts.

For payment gateway, they will provide almost all popular payment systems in Indonesia. Currently there are KlikBCA, Cash (BCA, Mandiri), PayPal and Bank Transfer, and following are Mandiri Internet Banking and credit cards. For payment, Multiply also provides invoice model which customizable to facilitate the pre-order item sales.

From my observations during the events and conversations with several vendors, although there are still some adjustments for the change from their old platform to the new one, the seller is interested in what Multiply Commerce could offer, the ease and completeness of selling facility. Multiply also still provides many of their old facilities (for networking) such as the means of various writings through the blog and photos.

Multiply is also now aggressively campaigning their service as Social Commerce and tagline Shopping, Selling, Sharing. One of the advantages is the social networking that already has many users, the merger between the number of users (the market) and sales facilities are some things to look for another online mall service.

Obviously this new system implemention meets some constraints. The seller responses also vary, some felt difficult and takes time to convert their store data into the new platform, but some also feel the process is easy. Some sellers also stick with the old mechanism without Multiply Commerce (Multiple 5.0) platform.

Statistics from Multiply for Indonesian users is also explained by Andy Djiwandono, VP of Marketing & Business Multiply Indonesia. They already have 2 million active members, 7 million unique visitors per month, 17 categories of stores, 35,000 shops, 2,000 new merchants joined per month, 50,000 new products per month and 8,000 products listed on Multiply Commerce since released May 10, 2011. As for global users, there are more than 70,000 sellers and 20 million unique visitors each month.

Multiply Q2 target this year is not grandiose, as described in the video below, they seem to pursue educational goals, both to the buyer and seller. It makes sense, because changes in behavior would require time to adapt.

There is one other interesting thing that I found at the event yesterday, which related to sellers and how they respond to this new platform, but I'll write in another article.

Meanwhile, following is a brief interview with Daniel Tumiwa, Country Manager for Multiply Indonesia about Multiply Commerce and their plans in Q2 this year. We are sorry if the video quality is less than the maximum.

Translated by Nita Sellya.