Siam Piwat goes big on its online shopping venture

Siam Piwat, the operator of major shopping complexes in Bangkok like Siam Center, Siam Discovery Center, and Paradise Park, revealed that it has invested Bt1 billion in the development of its first online shopping initiative to be launched officially by the end of this year.
Siriphen Intuputi, senior deputy managing director for advertising and public relations at Siam Piwat, said the company had already conducted a soft launch of its emagazine titled ‘SSPATIAL’ since the end of last year, to pilot the online shopping project. 
The new emagazine is conceived with the ‘The New Dimension of Inspiration’ concept and will cater to digitalage shoppers whose changing lifestyle seeks convenience and quickness. Today’s shoppers also want to access all details and information about products and services anytime and anywhere, Siriphen said.
“Ecommerce will be another sales channel for the company to focus on in order to provide convenience to individual shoppers as well as retail tenants at our shopping malls, who will be able to offer selective products to their clients online. We [Siam Piwat] will be just an intermediary in seeking additional channels for them to place and sell their goods via the Internet,” said Siriphen.
He added that some shoppers, however, want to see and try the real products and hence they prefer to make actual visits to the store.
She added that the company had invested Bt1 billion to develop the online facility to back up the company’s ecommerce initiative, which would be launched in the third quarter of this year.
Siriphen said that SSPATIAL is an emagazine that has been developed to put together all interesting content and inspiration for the new generation. They include information on products available at Siam Piwat’s shopping malls, as well as promotions and new fashion trends offered by its tenant stores.
In addition, the emagazine will also introduce Thai products as well as any updates on nearby shopping malls and working places. In the future, SSPATIAL will become the online shop, which will sell products to individual shoppers for greater convenience 24 hours a day.
“The statistics show an increasing number of Internet users today, which is at about 45 hours a week, or 6.4 hours a day on average,” she said.
“After having a soft launch since the end of last year, SSPATIAL currently draws more than 300,000 viewers to our emagazine website. We expect to achieve 1 million viewers on our website by the end of this year. We also have 15,000 followers on our Facebook fanpage,” said Siriphen. 
She added that the emagazine had also reached more than 7 million readers and 150,000 times of engagement.