Deal Going, an Indonesia-based daily deals aggregator website, launched its new feature called “Mall Diskon” (or in English, “Discount Mall”) today during the Shop Fair event in Jakarta. This new feature is part of Deal Going’s efforts to differentiate itself from the other daily deals aggregator websites, by also providing a marketplace to its customers.
What is Discount Mall? It is a discounted online marketplace. The mechanism is quite interesting, as the merchants need only to register themselves for free, and Deal Going will handle the rest. Deal Going plans to help the merchants with almost everything, ranging from setting up the website shop, promotions through social media, Google, and the Deal Going website, and even to payment methods. The payment method is called Go Pay and it’s supported by Indonesian online bank transaction website iPayMu. Yes, all the products at Discount Mall will be discounted, but no black market products are allowed though.
How does Deal Going make money from this? Revenue sharing. Deal Going tells us that the share of revenue depends on the agreement between the merchant and Deal Going, but the number will at least be more than 10 percent, where some of it will be allocated to pay for the administration fees such as from banks and other services.
Deal Going only just started in July last year, but already it has good growth. At the press conference, the company shared stats about its progress so far:
- The website has 50,000 unique visitors with more than 200,000 page views each month.
- It has around 9,000 members and subscribers with 50 percent rate of returning visitors.
- Its clickthrough rate (CTR) is 10 percent.
Deal Going also has branches in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and South Korea.
A company representative says she believes that the Mall Discount’s strength lies in its nationwide promotional power, so the targeted merchants using it will be seeking a promotional boost. I second her belief that that’s the right approach, because taking 10 percent and requesting price discounts can really hurt the profit margin of participating firms - but if Deal Going can prove that the promotional boost is worth it, then everything should be fine.
More importantly, though, is how much more interesting the Indonesian e-commerce scene has become with the presence of both Discount Mall and Go Pay, enabling even tech newbies to be an online merchant anywhere.
