Doing business at the comfort of your homes!

Shopping online? Shopping on taobao.com when you’re right here in Singapore? No problem!

All this is made possible, with the invention of “E-commerce”, and also the increasing trend in online shopping in Singapore.

According to a research by Paypal, the size of the Singapore online shopping market reached S$1.1 billion in 2010 and is forecasted to hit S$4.4 billion in 2015. Of course, a prediction back then in early 2011 would not be a good representation, for it could be less or even more with the rise of many E-commerce startups in Singapore over the last five years. 

Source: https://www.techinasia.com/the-stats-and-facts-of-online-shopping-in-singapore/

With increased Internet access over the past few years, many shoppers like you and me have been taking it to the Internet for deals, or would I say “lobangs” in our local lingo.

Source: https://vulcanpost.com/14559/online-shopping/

Here’s showing how much we have “invested” in E-commerce over the past five years, and it is continuing to grow!

We are constantly on the Internet for various reasons, to surf, to research, to explore, and to shop.

E-commerce covers a wide variety of goods and services, from travel tour packages to buying clothes online. The key feature of e-commerce is that, ALL transactions are done ONLINE (without paper documentation).

Source: https://vulcanpost.com/14559/online-shopping/

We cannot deny the fact that we now find our air tickets and accommodations online, rather than going to tour agencies to sign up for packages over the counter.

Taobao.com and qoo10.sg has become our best pals, functioning in a similar manner through a B2C (Business to Consumer) model where businesses sell their goods to consumers like us.

But what about our local rising peer-to-peer E-commerce platform Carousell. While I assume most of you would have heard of it or probably have used it to buy or sell items, it was a surprise to me when I found out it was a Singapore creation. (It was founded in 2012 and the first item sold on it was an Amazon Kindle e-reader)

Even though it has been in the market for three years, I had only heard and used it only at the beginning of this year.

 Guess what! The first thing I got from Carousell was…. a textbook for Communication Theory (Not the usual ‘wow’ stuff that people usually get from Carousell)

Though branded as a P2P e-commerce, I feel that B2C is possible on this platform.
I’ve seen instances of brands with physical shops having item listings on Carousell (though I think the place of transaction would most likely be in the shop itself), where they actually use it as a form of promotion for the products that the brand has. Though transaction does not occur over the Internet, it reaches out to consumers and through the “Chat to buy” functions or the prices listed on the item listing, consumers are able to make informed choices about getting the product or not, just like the usual e-commerce websites Taobao and qoo10.

While Carousell is perhaps the next big thing in e-commerce. It is definitely not a guaranteed viable options for businesses to tread on if they want to make it big in terms of sales and figures. Carousell, ultimately, is suited for peer-to-peer where (usually single) items are sold to or bought by individuals. Here are some drawbacks for Carousell if businesses want to use it to further rake in profits.

1. Categorizing of products
We all know that the number of products on Carousell is something we both cannot imagine. What more to actually look through them, in the case that we do not have the specific name of the item that we are looking for. And looking through the searches one by one is like telling you to look through google results whenever you type something on the search bar.

2. Typically low pricing
Though the prices can range from thousands to a few dollars depending on the value of the item, prices of items sold on it can are relatively low and similar products may sell at a relatively competitive price. The price war game is strong here!

3. It goes item listing by item listing

This goes to say that you can only deal one item at a time. Compare that to your usual shopping pals Taobao and qoo10, where you have a shopping cart to check out at the end of your (impulse) purchases. That goes to say NO for bundle deals, unless you really ask the sellers for it. Such a hassle. And the deals may not be all done through bank transfers, most of the time through meetups.

Guess we still have to give our local budding Carousell a little more time to develop a relationship with us, to become close pals like Taobao and qoo10!