Colin Charles Agenda

I was recently in Taiwan for my very first trip to the country. Staying at the grand hyatt taipei meant I got to see the taipei 101 all the time. Boy is it tall, and boy was it amazing to see the building that displaced the Kuala Lumpur Twin Towers for being the tallest building in the world.

I had the pleasure of hanging out with a chap from Zalora Taiwan, who told me how e-commerce works there and how 7-Eleven stores help push e-commerce forward. The wikipedia entry tells all (I highlight the e-commerce relevant): Takkyubin, direct marketing shopping service, pre-ordered purchases. 80% of urban household shoppers visit a 7-Eleven each week.

It seems that in Taiwan, you can make your purchase orders and have them sent to the nearest 7-Eleven that is convenient for you. This is a boon for Zalora and all forms of e-commerce. All this thanks to the magic of Takkyubin. You can also handle “cash on delivery” operations at the 7-Eleven (so, you make a payment in the morning before leaving to work, when the Takkyubin delivery comes, the local 7-Eleven gives them money, and when you come back from work, you collect your item at the 7-Eleven store – isn’t this genius?).

The amount of 7-Eleven stores and the convenience of receiving or paying for your product within a 24-hour timeframe is awesome. You don’t even need a credit card.

Contrast this to Malaysia: cash-on-delivery is almost unheard of when it comes to “true e-commerce”, you need to have a credit card or process a bank transfer, you must be home from 9am-6pm, i.e. when the delivery company sends you items. If you live alone, e-commerce is tough if you have a job — unless you ship stuff to your office.

I see that in Malaysia, there exists TA-Q-BIN. Zalora Malaysia ships with GDEX (much like Pos Malaysia in terms of operation hours), but also with TA-Q-BIN. The rates aren’t friendly to e-commerce, but they do have the cash-on-delivery option, something that has been sorely lacking in the Malaysian market. However no 24-hour pickup schedule, because they lack much physical presence.

Imagine a partnership here between Berjaya (owners of 7-Eleven) with Pos Malaysia (saner rates)? This alone could boost e-commerce in the country, especially if Pos Malaysia’s Poslaju folk start taking cash (yes, I know, its trusting the postman to carry money… have a little faith will ya?).

The end of September/beginning of October is a most exciting time if you dig MySQL & its diaspora. September 29-30 is MySQL Connect (register – early bird ends September 7) in San Francisco and October 1-2 is Percona Live NYC (register – early bird ends September 1) in New York City. I’m just attending MySQL Connect (thanks Dave for the ticket) and I’m speaking in New York so will take the redeye on Sunday. Four packed days of MySQL/MariaDB/Percona/tools/etc. across two coasts. Who can pass this up?

Who else is going to two of these events? Oh, MariaDB is also proud to be a sponsor of Percona Live NYC.

continuing my awe with the great go-to-market execution of zalora malaysia, i happened to visit a starbucks over the weekend (my first in quite some time; i prefer drinking my rm2-5 coffee at the club). i also purchased my first frappuccino, normally preferring to go for a long black or a caramel macchiatto. why?

you can thank zalora & lazada. i saw an awesome banner offering a rm30 and rm50 discount.

one thing is clear though is that i could have probably done without the frappuccino. the starbucks staff weren’t proactive in giving me the voucher, and when prompted they just told me to take it. anyone could grab it basically…

that said, this is smart. in addition to whatever zalora is doing, they’re also going after the starbucks/yuppie/coffee drinking crowd. whom are mostly surfing the internet (no shortage of laptops at this particular starbucks). target market? check.

see the design for the coupons: zalora and lazada.

I’m not your typical shopper, but I’ve worked with a tonne of e-commerce in my days. From shopping carts to getting the word out, I’ve probably got to start listing more down here. 

One of the first shopping malls in Malaysia to me was jipaban. The terms (for sellers) weren’t awesome (have a bunch of stuff scribbled in my notebook that never materialized into a post), and I have no idea how they’re doing in Malaysia today. Strength? Blog advertising network link. Shortly thereafter, I saw postme, run by pos malaysia. I saw ads in the edge and even regular newspapers like the star. Clearly more promise but again, no idea how they’re doing today.

Then came zalora. Its hard to avoid them. Ads on the radio. Loyalty with bcard (seen at borders, starbucks, etc.). Today in email, hsbc cardholders get 15% off on zalora. Almost every other google ad that I see happens to be from zalora.

They’re going strong with mass media. And that’s brilliant because in Malaysia, online shopping/e-commerce have many impediments and zalora is out there spending money to make it better and convince people that buying online makes more sense. Malaysia totally needs this sort of forward thinking. Going beyond just the blogs that are part of blog advertising networks. 

Whether zalora succeeds or not in the long term, the money spent on a&p, getting the word out and persuading more people to become online shoppers is highly welcome. It will certainly help lots of independent retailers do well too.

I’m not a huge fan of many oppressive Malaysian laws, but I believe we need to fight the good fight and never let our freedoms on the Internet expire. The government works for us, not the other way around. An expiring regime tries many tricks, but its clear that there are rifts within the regime.

If you need more information as to why the amendments to the Evidence Act are bad, the Center for Independent Journalism in Malaysia has a pretty good resource: http://stop114a.wordpress.com/. Read more about it. I’m particularly pleased there is an infographic so for people that are lazy to read, the infographic tells all.

There’s a huge chunk of resources, and you can even put on a twibbon on Facebook & Twitter. I’ve done so on twitter at least.

I don’t plan on being silenced or blacked out per se, but its important people know about this movement.

When I’m in the USA, if I get the time, I do like to consume some television. I’m an odd person – I’m usually watching the advertisements more than the television shows themselves. And the promotions that surround shows.

Its very common for advertising for products to have several logos at the end: usually one from facebook with the page name, and another from twitter with the page name. Nowadays it seems to be getting common to offer a hashtag and this I presume is just useful for Twitter. (though it seems trending data now on google+ also has hashtags.)

Today, for the first time I saw an ad for Google Plus. Used by a television show called sullivan & son. They advertised a facebook page and told fans to “search google plus for sullivan & son”. For a google hangout! 

I searched Google for sullivan & son and ironically the Google+ page (which has a horrible URL) wasn’t even on the front-page. Google is clearly missing an opportunity here.

Two opportunities: 

1. short-form URLs (like what gplus.to provides – in fact you have the option to do profiles.google.com/username if it is not a page, but your own profile)
2. promoting Google+ profile pages in search results