Today I would like to share some of the growing Indonesia ecommerce startups as the start of Startups to Watch series. The criteria for this section: most of them are relatively unknown or not popular to the public and usually they’re funded less than $500k, e.g the startups in the bootrapping or angel/seed stage. They should already have some considerable tractions or good team.
The descriptive information is from the startups themselves and I’d just give a short analysis pros and cons from what I know from them and Indonesia ecommerce market.
Yogyakarta Jakpat – A mobile survey platform
A mobile platform to collect data from respondent faster & cheaper within mobile tech. Anyone who needs survey can signup get free dashboard and create surveys. We’ll charge per survey only.
Anyone can register as respondent by installing our app in jakpat.net/app , register, pass verification, completing profile surveys. Each time respondent work on surveys can get points, points can be redeemed within some rewards from airtime, vouchers to cash.
We have over 48K respondents on our app that readily answer any surveys from clients. Since the launch of our dashboard in end of Nov 2015, we currently serve 20-30 companies per month. Our clients : Tiger Global LLC, Paktor, Daum Kakao, AT Kearney, Accenture, Mead Jhonson, Indomaret, Nutrifood, Garudafood, Y Digital, Dentsu, Mirum, Starcom Mediavest, Iris Worldwide
Pros: a localized version of SurveyMonkey which is customized to fit with the local need. It doesn’t have to face with strong competition at this moment and already uses a shortcut by jumping into mobile. And Jakpat has accumulated some very good clients. Jakpat can also utilize the advantage of Yogakarta with low cost and good talents as this is the city of university.
Cons: Jakpat is now focusing on the well-established and big companies as they could pay well. But I believe that it’s future would be on the SMEs to scale up, Indonesia hosted a huge amount of SMEs. Otherwise it’s just like a market research agency rather than a tech startup.
Surabaya – Cakning.com ecommerce drop-shipping site
Cakning.com is a dropshipping marketplace in Indonesia. The office is located in Surabaya, East Java. These days more and more people want to start their own business, but they are having a big barrier such as: lack of capital, don’t know any good suppliers, don’t know how to do it, etc. The Indonesian ecommerce startup provides wide variations of products for dropshippers to sell using dropship method. The products itself are from vendors who joined as suppliers in Cakning.com. So everyone who wants to start selling products can start selling in minutes with joining Cakning.com as a member/dropshipper, without any cost.
Now Cakning has about 25.000 members and 500 vendors. The products number are about 5000 SKUs. Cakning’s member growth is about 3000 new members/month.
Is Cakning similar with Tokopedia or Bukalapak? It’s different model. Cakning.com specifically connecting product owner with dropshippers (resellers). Not directly to buyers. So all the features inside Cakning.com’s member area are all to support the resellers so they can sell well. To become a member in Cakning.com is free of charge. But member has a chance to upgrade their membership into premium member with one time fee (Rp.100.000). Premium member has access to online training inside member area and all marketing tools. To become a vendor/supplier is free as well. Cakning.com only charge 4% for each transaction.
Pros: the online biz is growing with a strategic position of Surabaya, the second most populous city in Indonesia (more than 3M people) just after Jakarta. And it’s also located on the East Java with many cities around far from the central business city Jakarta (758km from Jakarta) so can also avoid the highly competitive market in Jakarta area. The location is important as the nature of drop-shipping is better for the sellers closer to the central business.
Cons: Cakning is probably facing the same issue with Tanahabang. As the business grow they need to handle many logistics and customer service things. And due to it’s location, it will miss a big part of resellers who are concentrated in Jakarta.
Sillicon Valley – XENDIT
The team is led by Moses Lo, who grew up in Malaysia and Australia, has work experience at BCG and Amazon, and also started a successful tailored suit company in Australia. The team’s lead technical co-founder is Bo Chen, who has previously worked at Ripple Labs – his expertise in ledger and payment systems gives us confidence in our product.
Xendit features a mobile wallet which you can use to 
pay your friends. If your transaction size is larger than the funds held in your wallet, the wallet will automatically obtain funds from your debit card account to complete the transaction. You only need to enter a debit card number at the time of signup. To withdraw funds out of your wallet, all you need is an active bank account.
Our target customer is the 18-35 year old urban Indonesian that has a debit card and smartphone, buys things online, and goes out with friends 2 to 3 times a week. He or she is inspired by technology innovation because of his/her global perspective on the world. We are backed by a small group of investors here in Silicon Valley.
Pros: providing a new free and somewhat convenient way for Indonesians to transfer money. It’s also focus on mobile to catch the m-commerce trend in the island country. Founding team also has experience with the relevant companies like Amazon or Paypal, they have five team members graduated from UC-Berkeley.
Cons: the based location is very far from the market so somewhat not easy to feel the market feedback or to do business development. They also definitely need some strong partnership with top local banks or retailers in Indonesia to tackle the market.
Jakarta Tanahabang.com – clothes drop-shipping and marketplace
Tanah Abang is the largest clothes offline market in Indonesia, Irawanto – Founder/ CEO Tanahabang named his ecommerce startup after the market name. The main objective of tanahabang.com is to facilitate customers in buying clothes directly from manufacturers with a click of a button.
Our carefully chosen collection always reflect the current trends in the market at affordable prices with the best quality.
A big portion of tanahabang.com customers are resellers, online shops, or offline/retail shops.
Tanahabang.com offers dropship services, where online resellers can sell our products through their own channels (Facebook, instagram, tokopedia, olx, or via bbm) and complete their purchases with Tanahabang once their customers have purchased an item, where we will do deliveries on behalf of our resellers to their customers afterwards.
Due to a huge demand from our suppliers to list their products directly on our website, we have recently implemented a wholesale marketplace system, where customers are able to access and purchase products directly from specific stores in Tanah Abang.
Pros: this business has been running more then ten years since 2003 and already has a considerable customer community and profit if compared with many startups are still burning money. The founder might not be necessary raising fund.
Cons: Founder is facing with management issue in a large scale so he would definitely need a more capable team, experienced VC or advisor to grow Tanahabang to a new level. The new marketplace is also a jump into the red ocean with many vicious sharks and there are some signals of going down so they’re going to pivot model.