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Shopee

Shopee – Southeast Asia’s Largest e-Commerce Platform.

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Shopee is an online platform that provides customers with a simple, safe, and quick online purchasing experience. With over 343 million monthly active users as of 2021, it is regarded as Southeast Asia’s largest e-commerce platform.

About The Company

Shopee is a multinational technology business based in Singapore that primarily focuses on e-commerce. The company is headquartered in Singapore Science Park. It is part of the part company Sea Group. Shopee began its operations in 2015 from Singapore. The company also offers online shopping and selling services to buyers and sellers in numerous European and American nations.

History

In 2015, Shopee, a socially driven, mobile-centric platform where customers can browse, shop, and sell, made its debut in Singapore. This platform makes online shopping simple and safe for buyers and sellers by integrating logistical and payment assistance. In order to compete successfully with other e-commerce platforms in the market like Coupang, Lazada, Tokopedia, and AliExpress, Shopee, which was earlier an app, developed its own website. The company uses its own escrow service dubbed “Shopee Guarantee” to guarantee online shopping security as a way to set itself apart from competitors. It withholds payment from merchants until customers have received their items.

In 2019, the company inaugurated its new headquarters at Singapore Science Park. The new facility is six times bigger than the previous one, which was located in the Ascent Building, and has over 244,000 sq. feet of area that can house over 3,000 employees. WeWork in Singapore had previously leased this structure. Due to Shopee’s quick expansion, the lease was later given back to it. By doing this, it intensifies its effort to enter the digital economy.

Shopee
Image source: abplive.com

Business Model

Shopee began as a C2C (consumer to consumer) marketplace but has subsequently transitioned to a hybrid C2C and B2C format. To help its users logistically, it collaborates with more than 70 delivery service companies across its markets. For item pickup and drop in Singapore, Shopee partnered with logistics startup NinjaVan. In India, it collaborated with Delhivery and Ecom Express for the delivery of products. However, in 2022, the company announced that it is shutting its operations in India.

New Launches

An initiative named “Shopee University” was introduced by Shopee in 2016 to help local company owners and entrepreneurs establish their online stores in the Philippines. In the Philippines and Singapore, it introduced Shopee Mall in 2017, which featured over 200 brands. The specialized portal offers thousands of products from top regional stores and brands. Shopee Mall was developed to provide a more varied online shopping experience and to serve more established brands better.

2018 saw the opening of Shopee’s China Marketplace platform, which gives consumers in the Philippines and Singapore simple access to goods and products from Chinese vendors without paying shipping or agent costs. Shopee Philippines introduced Shopee Cares PH, a social-media customer support division active on Twitter and Facebook, in 2021. In 2021 it also introduced its food delivery services in the Malaysian and Thai markets.

Controversies

In 2019, Shopee Philippines was accused of defrauding Filipino fans of the Blackpink. #ShopeeScam became a trending topic on Twitter around the world.  The 568 top spenders on Shopee Philippines’ online store were given tickets to a Meet and Greet session as part of a campaign. However, a number of fans claimed that after receiving confirmation that they had won tickets, It then withdrew them. Others shared screenshots demonstrating how Shopee had altered the rules of the contest a day before this event. Currently, the Department of Trade and Industry is looking into Shopee.

Founder – Forrest Li

Forrest Li founded Shopee in 2015. He is a multibillionaire businessman from Singapore. He also founded Sea Limited. Garena and Shopee are subsidiaries of Sea Limited. Li, a Chinese national born in Tianjin, moved to Singapore soon after receiving an engineering degree from Shanghai Jiaotong University. He also has an MBA degree from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

CEO – Chris Feng

Chris Feng is the CEO of Shopee. He is also the CEO of Sea Group’s division for financial services and digital payments, called Seamonkey. Feng oversaw the mobile games department at Sea Group before assuming his present position. Before joining Sea Group, he was a member of the Southeast Asia core team of German startup Rocket Internet, which helped launch online stores like Lazada and Zalora. He was also Lazada’s chief purchasing officer and a regional managing director at Zalora.

Mercari

Mercari – A Japanese e-Commerce Company That Became The Country’s First Unicorn.

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Shintaro Yamada, a famous Japanese businessman founded Mercari, a Japanese e-commerce platform in 2013. The business was started in Japan, but it eventually entered the United States after a few years. So, currently, it serves two markets because in 2018 the European branch of Mercari was shut down as a “temporary retreat.” The present CEO of the company is Shintaro Yamada who has been holding the position since 2013. The mobile application of Mercari is a big hit among the Japanese people for two main reasons, security and ease to use. The Mercari marketplace app is the largest community-powered marketplace in Japan. Transactions worth more than 10 billion JPY are carried out on this platform every month. 

Early Days

When Mercari was officially launched in Japan, it had competitors like Yahoo!. But the reason why Japanese people rapidly accepted the usage of Mercari was some of its unique features that increased the convenience of the customers. Back in February 2013 when Yamada founded Mercari, its original name was Kouzoh, Inc. After a few months, the mobile app of the company for both Android and iOS devices was launched. It was shocking to witness that more than a million people signed in for this online shopping platform within a year. 

When Yamada decided to build the app, he planned to develop something similar to an online flea market. So, the features that were added in Mercari were well-thought and implemented. For example, putting up an item online for sale can be a rather lengthy and tiresome process and it requires to be done from a computer. Since It was developed mainly for smartphones, the selling process through this platform became a lot easier. Many Japanese people were attracted to Mercari due to this reason, especially who didn’t own a personal computer. Mercari increased the scope of customer-to-customer market service among the Japanese population. 

Mercari
Image source: prnewswire.com

Growth & Expansion

From the very beginning, the growth of Mercari has been spectacular. After a year, Mercari witnessed approximately 4.5 million people using the app and more than 100,000 new items getting listed on a daily basis. The total transaction per day also exceeded $10 million. As the company was becoming the hype, it attracted investors including Global Brain Corporation, Globis Capital Partners, World Innovation Lab, East Ventures, and many more. Due to its early and rapid growth, Mercari was taken into the international market (United States) in 2014. The company expanded so soon in the international market due to high funding (raised $75 million in Series D funding). 

After a couple of years in 2016, Company reached the $1 billion mark and became Japan’s first startup to gain unicorn status. This was a very big achievement in the startup community of Japan inspiring the people to come up with more innovative ideas. After expanding to the United States, the company’s next target was the UK but the European market of Mercari was closed shortly after its opening. This happened because the company was unaware of the local conditions there and thus the idea to launch Mercari in the European market backfired. As the company became bigger, it decided to go public in 2018 and offered its IPO. After the IPO, the company’s valuation became $7.4 billion. The company was also named “Best App” by Google Play for two consecutive years. 

Shintaro Yamada – Founder & CEO of Mercari

Being the CEO and founder of Mercari, Shintaro Yamada currently owns one-third of the company. Yamada started his career with Rakuten, a little e-commerce company that he joined as an intern. While he was in Rakuten, he developed an auction website for the company and he started getting rough ideas about the company’s operations and how an e-commerce company functions. After a few years, he decided to start his own venture and founded Mercari. 

wayfair

Wayfair – The Journey of American E-Commerce Company.

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Wayfair is a furniture and home goods retailer based in the United States. The company was founded in 2002 and was previously known as CSN Stores. Wayfair grew into the behemoth it is today as a result of the dot-com crash in the early 2000s, the evolving nature of internet shopping, and an increasingly global supply chain. It has emerged as a pioneer of its peers. 

The online marketplace features 14 million products from over 11,000 international suppliers. It also has 80 “house brands,” which aren’t actually brands but are used to categorize and merchandise products based on certain decorating aesthetics. The company does not manufacture any of the products it sells and instead operates on a drop-ship basis. When a customer places an order, Wayfair purchases the item from one of its suppliers, who then ships it to the customer in a variety of ways. Wayfair has 12 fulfillment centers and over 12 million square feet of warehouse space in Europe and North America. 

The Wayfair Brand And Its “Lifestyle Brands”

Wayfair is more than just Wayfair.com, Joss & Main, AllModern, Perigold, and Birch Lane are also owned by the company. Wayfair.com is the company’s main hub, where you can find everything from furniture to appliances that went viral. AllModern constitutes modern and chic furniture, whereas Joss & Main and Birch Lane are nearly identical and lean towards traditional furniture.

Perigold, the newest site, is high-end, but it appears to be designed specifically for someone who owns a mansion or a villa. The company refers to these sites as “lifestyle brands.” Beyond the “lifestyle brands,” the products are further subdivided into one of Wayfair’s 80 “house brands”, which are only available on Wayfair.com.

The Establishment of Wayfair

Wayfair, formerly known as CSN Stores, began with the website racksandstands.com, selling media stands and warehouse furniture. In 2003, Wayfair expanded to include patio and garden goods suppliers, three online stores, and more than a dozen employees and relocated its headquarters to Newbury Street in Boston. Over the next two years, the company expanded its offering to include home décor, institutional, office, kitchen and dining furniture and materials, as well as home improvement goods, luggage, and lighting, as well as bed and bath materials. The company made $100 million in sales in 2006. Within the next four years, the company expanded in both domestic and international markets.

Wayfair
Image Source: digital.hbs.edu

CSN Stores opened an office in London in 2008 and began exporting to Canada and selling in the United Kingdom. The company relocated its headquarters to 177 Huntington Avenue in 2010. The company launched Joss & Main, a members-only private sales online store, at the end of that year. CSN Stores had over 200 online stores by 2011. Battery Ventures, Great Hill Partners, HarbourVest Partners, and Spark Capital provided $165 million in funding to the company in June 2011. Wayfair.com went live on September 1, 2011. Wayfair had incorporated all of its niche websites, with the exception of Joss & Main and AllModern, into Wayfair.com as of July 2012. 

Wayfair’s Response to an Emergency

Wayfair responds to crisis situations in the broader community where they have the resources and ability to assist on an emergency basis. The company worked with Habitat for Humanity International in February 2013 to directly assist the communities affected by Hurricane Sandy. Wayfair delivered over $50,000 in home furnishings to Habitat ReStore resale stores in Coastal New Jersey. Product sales funds directly supported disaster response efforts and home rebuilding in the region.

Wayfair responded to the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon in April 2013 by donating $50,000 to Technology Underwriting Greater Good (TUGG) in collaboration with the company’s founders to directly assist victims of the bombing. Wayfair employees also raised $8,000 for One Fund Boston, which will be used to assist those most affected by the tragedy.

Stepping into the Future

Wayfair recently opened its first permanent store in Natick, Massachusetts, following a series of pop-ups over the years. The company provides hundreds of smaller items that customers can take home with them, as well as an in-person taste of what its digital services are like. Customers can collaborate with designers to design rooms and touch fabrics used in a furniture customization program.

The Founders

Niraj Shah co-founded Wayfair with Steve Conine in 2002, and the pair quickly expanded the company to become the largest online retailer of home furnishings, housewares, and home improvement products in the United States, with $15.3 billion in net sales for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2021. Wayfair employs over 16,200 employees and has large operations in the United States and Europe.

Niraj worked as the CEO and co-founder of Simplify Mobile, the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Greylock Partners, the COO and a member of the board of iXL, and the CEO and co-founder of Spinners, which was sold to iXL in 1998. Niraj is a member of the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership and the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce boards of directors. Niraj graduated from Cornell University with a B.S. in engineering and currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.

freelancer.com

Matt Barrie : The Founder of Global Freelancer Marketplace, ‘Freelancer.com’

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The growing online marketplace has got the scope for every profession to flourish, and it’s a golden era for the freelancers. How many of you know about Fiverr? Well, I can bet a lot of you guys must be using it already to earn some extra cash, isn’t it? Fiverr was launched in 2010 as a two-sided platform for both the freelancers and the clients, to do any kind of job that is required to set up a company. But, just a year before the launch of Fiverr, Matt Barrie founded freelancer.com, an online platform to upload your projects and hire suitable freelancers to do the job. And today, it is the largest marketplace in the world in terms of the projects uploaded, and the number of users.

Matt Barrie founded freelancer.com in 2009, which is headquartered in Sydney, Australia.

Early Life

Barrie was born on 16 August 1973, in Adelaide, Australia. For his undergraduate course, he went to the University of Sydney to pursue a BSc Hons, and later, received a post-graduate degree in electrical engineering from the Stanford University in 1998.

Early Career

His first step into the professional world was right after he graduated and was hired by Kroll O’Gara Information Security Group. During his time here, he acquired an information security website, Packetstorm from Ken Williams.

Barrie-Matt Freelancer.com
Image Source: icmi.com.au

In 2000, he joined Innovation Capital as an investment manager and left the company within a year. This was followed by joining Sensory Networks in 2001, where he became the chief executive officer. He left the company after five years, and in between, he attended the executive program for growing companies at Stanford.

In January 2008, Barrie joined as Non-Executive Director in Julius Finance followed by joining QuintessenceLabs as an Advisor in October 2008. Barrie also played a role as an Adjunct Associate Professor in the University of Sydney for 13 years, and finally, left the post in 2013.

Forming Freelancer.com

After joining and leaving many companies, since 1998, Barrie finally formed freelancer.com in 2009. But, the idea of forming an online platform, where freelancers and professionals could meet, wasn’t one of his perfectly planned start-up executed henceforth.

He saw the vast opportunity of this freelancing website when he needed a freelancer to get one of his data entry job done, but was unable to find anyone fit for the project. So, he searched for people online, especially, for college students and found GetAFreelancer where he could upload his project and find a suitable freelancer. After he registered, his job was done within a few days. This gave Barrie a very clear picture of what’s next in the online business trend, and what possibly can create an enormous potential market.

Success of Freelancer.com

Within six years of the company’s establishment, it has expanded the marketplace to over 247 countries, regions, and territories. The company now deals with more than 16million users with more than 8 million projects updated in various categories. Some of the categories of freelancer.com that lured most of the professionals to get their jobs done were software development, graphic designing, and digital marketing.

Freelancer.com became very popular quickly because the services were exchanged online, and the company was trusted enough. For many college students who belonged to remote areas, where finding jobs offline was very much difficult, got a fair opportunity to showcase their talent and earn money. Freelancer.com also created a global network and gave an ample of different options to choose from especially for the clients.

Once the company started expanding, it acquired many crowdsourcing marketplaces like GetAFreelancer.com, EUFreelance.com, LimeExchange, Freelancer.co.uk, etc. By 2016, Freelancer.com was operating in 34 different languages and 21 currencies. So far, some of the biggest clients of Freelancer.com are NASA, Airbus, and U.S Department of Energy.

What after Freelancer.com?

Barrie clearly didn’t hit a pause after the huge success of Freelancer.com. In November 2015, he joined Escrow.com as chief executive and president. Escrow.com is an online payment company, where he is still a position holder.

In November 2018, he joined Freightlancer as Executive Chairman. It’s a marketplace for shipping and transportation which also provides metro delivery through a network of freelancers from Freelancer.com.

fiverr

Fiverr : A Two-way Platform for Selling and Buying Digital Services

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Every time a new company is launched, the setup requires a lot of pre-requisite. From designing a logo to maintaining a company’s blog, everything needs to be done at a professional level. For doing this, companies generally hire freelancers. Now, instead of looking for individual freelancers and separately hiring them, how convenient would it be to have access to a single platform from where you can communicate with freelance contractors for all your requirements?

Fiverr, which can also be designated as an online virtual shopping mall, is literally the best and most wanted site for any freelancers and business companies. The service provider can earn some extra cash through this, and the companies can also get their job done in a hassle-free manner.

On 1st of February 2010, Micha Kaufman and Shai Wininger launched Fiverr. The company has its headquarters based in Tel Aviv, Israel providing its services across the world. Fiverr is available in 5 different languages, including English, Spanish, French, Dutch and Portuguese.

Fiverr Founders
Image Source: fiverr.com

History of the $5 Fiverr ‘Gig’

Kaufman and Wininger wanted to create something new, which would break the regular credence of working hours from 9 to 5. So, they came up with an idea of creating a website with a variety of online services like logo designing, data entry, digital marketing, voice translation and many more. Here people could work according to their comfort neglecting the 9 to 5 job scenario. So, the two young entrepreneurs created a single platform which is capable of providing almost every digital service under one roof.

The company started succeeding at a very fast pace such that within a year it had grown 600% in transaction volume. The company received its first funding of $1 million in 1st June 2010 from Guy Gamzu and other angel investors. On 3rd May 2012, the company announced that it had raised another $15 million in the second round of funding from Accel Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners summing the total raised fund to $20 million. By this time, the company had 40 employees working in its different offices spread over Israel, U.S and Europe.

The Growth of an Innovative Business Ever Witnessed by our Economy

In Fiverr, the minimum charge for every service is $5 and might extend up to $1,000 depending on the sellers and the quality of work. This system was started in January 2012 and allowed the sellers to earn more in exchange for their services after ten successful transactions. The services provided by Fiverr are known as ‘Gig’.

The $5 strategy attracted millions of customers from around the world, and by the end of 2011, the company was already providing 70,000 gigs. In 2012, the figure reached around 1.3 million with an increasing number of clients as well as service providers. By the end of this year, Fiverr witnessed an increase in sales by 190%, providing 4,000 new services, i.e. ‘Gigs’ daily.

The expansion of this leading marketplace resulted in the opening of a new office in New York in 2013.

Since 2013, Fiverr.com has acquired a position in the top 200 popular sites list of the world, and its Alexa rank is 291. By June 2013, Fiverr provided over 1.7 million Gigs to customers around 200 countries. The number of categories expanded to 120, which even included Arts & Crafts, Astrology and Gift cards. In December 2013, Fiverr launched its iOS app, followed by releasing the Android app in March 2014.

In August 2014, Fiverr raised $30 million in Series C funding from the existing investors along with Qumra Capital and private investors. This funding promised a larger and new workplace, where the sellers and customers can connect at a global level. In October 2014, Fiverr expanded the Gig service by launching the website in four different languages. Realizing the need for global connectivity, the strategies of Fiverr always played the ace in the digital marketplace.

In November 2015, Fiverr raised another $60 million in the funding round led by existing investors along with Square Peg Capital. With this, the company valued $550 million at that time. By now, the main target of Fiverr was to connect with every single freelancer out there and expand its Gig economy side. In November 2015, Fiverr raised another $60 million in the funding round led by existing investors along with Square Peg Capital. With this, the company valued $550 million at that time. By now, the main target of Fiverr was to connect with every single freelancer out there and expand its Gig economy.

In August 2016, Fiverr opened a new office in San Francisco, and the same year, Fiverr announced DCX Growth Accelerator as its new Global Agency of Record.

Latest Acquisitions and Partnership

In January 2018, AND CO came under the acquisition of Fiverr and the freelance software of AND CO was made free.

In February 2019, Fiverr announced the acquisition of ClearVoice, a content marketing platform. In June 2019, the company announced a new partnership with Lily Singh.

In July 2019, Fiverr introduced its Gaming store providing services like game development, game designing etc.