The first wave of e-commerce changed a lot of things when it came to the shopping behaviour of Indian consumers. To begin with, it literally killed the need for window shopping, India’s favourite pastime till just a few years ago. The increasing penetration of smartphones and the internet, as well as the ongoing push towards digitalisation, has added more impetus to this market evolution. Industry estimates project the country to be home to 829 million internet users within the next two years.
However, despite such splendid growth projections, it has not been all smooth sailing for the Indian e-commerce industry. End-consumer challenges such as payment failures, unclear delivery times, hidden costs, and – most critically – fake products continue to hinder the sector’s growth and adoption, despite the earnest measures taken by e-commerce giants to address them. The fact that such incidents have only grown in the frequency has been a major impediment to achieving the ultimate online shopping experience.
These challenges inspired the founders of Yokeasia Malls to come up with a concept that could address all e-commerce worries and make the overall online shopping experience even better. This is what led to the birth of the Digital Mall of Asia (DMA). A unique and advanced virtual shopping portal, DMA provides an immersive digital space that comes equipped with multiple visual and sensory elements – all aimed to deliver enhanced end-user experiences like never before!
But what makes Digital Mall of Asia unique? The answer: its never-seen-before offerings designed to cater to the specific needs of Indian retailers as well as shoppers!
What’s in for retailers?
Each retailer operating on the DMA platform will get exclusive rights to sell a particular product category or brand in their respective cities. This feature can help them eliminate artificial hyper-competitiveness, commonly seen on various e-commerce platforms. DMA’s reliable and transparent approach to making payment settlements will also bring much relief to the retailers across India, which otherwise is missing at the moment. E-commerce portals, on the other hand, sometimes take too long for payment settlements, which still remains a worry for most retailers.
By leveraging the DMA portal, retailers can integrate their offline inventories and leverage the strong local presence of retail stores around them. This, in turn, will help them ensure more efficient deliveries to shoppers, within a time frame of 2-24 hours as per customer’s availability. However, before all of this, sellers primarily need to get approval from the particular brand they want to tie up with, to begin their operations on the unique virtual portal.
And for shoppers?
Since DMA will run on a zero-commission model, retailers will only be liable to pay a fixed monthly rental to its owners. This will enable them to sell products at the cheapest price points possible, and improve their profitability. Now this will make shopping even more affordable for end customers as retailers will not share profits with the marketplace anymore. Rather, they can invest their money – previously paid as a commission – on other relevant tasks to achieve high customer satisfaction.
In addition to a premium, virtual shopping experience, shoppers will be able to check their products thoroughly, once received, and pay for it when fully satisfied. The shopper will get the original invoice of the vendor, only at the time of delivery. In case of any issue, the Retailer will directly replace the product. Doing so will help eradicate large-scale counterfeiting – the biggest consumer concern as of now – and further enable retailers to restore trust and reliability in the shopper’s mind.
The best part is, shoppers will not be required to share their card/bank details on the DMA portal for proceeding to the payment page. This will eliminate the issue of hacking and data theft, right away! On top of it, shoppers will have an option to choose from 50 brands of similar categories on one floor. This is one of the most unique features that consumers would get a chance to revel in while shopping from DMA.
With these attributes, DMA, which is set to go live in January 2020, is expected to bring a huge transformation in the Indian shopping landscape. While it will offer retailers a safe investment platform to sell items and get attractive returns, shoppers, on the other hand, will be enabled to take control of their data, which the existing e-commerce players would have anyway taken note to. DMA could be a game-changer, once implemented, as it has the potential to deliver convenience, security, and most importantly, seamless shopping and selling experience to customers and retailers, respectively.
