Tarad.com shows no sign of slowing down

Pawoot Pongvitayapanu, founder and　managing director of Tarad.com, said that even though the company has seen rapid growth in revenue in recent years after integrating with Japanese e-commerce firm Rakuten, there is still plenty of room for new e-commerce in Thailand. The site operator’s revenue grew by 200 per cent last year.

 

"Currently, only 30 to 40 per cent of total Internet users in Thailand have shopped online. There are a lot of potential customers, and our goal for this year is to engage them," Pawoot said.

 

The company’s four marketing strategies are offering guarantees; more payment channels and instalment options; more merchants; and competitive prices.

 

There are 200,000 vendors on Tarad.com, but only 1,500 of them use Rakuten’s model, which offers merchant assistance, a business analytic system and a payment system. It plans to have another 700 merchants using this model by the end of this year.

 

"The market value of e-commerce in Thailand is quite hard to estimate. According to the National Statistics Office, the value of the B2C e-commerce market last year was Bt84 billion, an increase of 20 per cent from Bt67 billion in 2010," Pawoot said.

 

This year, the e-commerce market in Thailand will be tough, as there will be more new players coming into the market, most of them from abroad. They will enter the Thailand market with an eye to expanding into the region with the launch of the Asean Economic Community in 2015.

"We need to make ourselves strong enough to compete with rivals and increase our customer experience," Pawoot said.

 

Tarad.com plans to launch an app for the iOS smart phone platform, following existing apps for the Android and Blackberry platforms. Only 1 per cent of total sales currently come from the mobile channel, however.