Mataharimall.com – Indonesian Department Store and Ecommerce

Mataharimall.com is the online shopping site which is considered one of the largest online retailer in Indonesia. It is part of notable department store chain with the same name, Matahari Mall Department store, duly established as public company PT Matahari Department Store Tbk, with stock code LPPF in Indonesia Stock Exchange. Around Indonesia, Matahari Mall has 132 department store which provide a wide range of ready-to-wear fashion products and other products. The company also operates various stores with specific consumer products such as Hypermart (hypermarket provides wide range of daily need products), Foodmart (supermarket mostly sells grocery), Boston Health and Beauty (pharmacy and beauty products), Timezone (game zone) and Superoti (bakery products).

In 2015, Matahari Mall initiated its online operations via www.mataharimall.com, after receiving investments of USD $500 million from Lippo Group, the largest and richest conglomerates in Indonesia. When the site was started, the management targeted the revenue both from offline and online retailer for 25 million USD during next 5 years, of which 20% is expected to comes from the online retailer, mataharimall.com.

Mataharimall.com provides a wide range of products such as women’s dress, lady blazer, wedges shoes, men’s fashion, men’s batik shirt, mukena, Muslim fashion, , beauty products, smartphone, electronic devices, sport equipments, food & beverage, etcetera. Many of these products are at a discounted price. To make shopping experience even more convenience, customers can choose a variety of payment methods, such as bank transfers, credit cards with 0% installment, o2o (Online-to-Offline), COD (Cash On Delivery), and other methods. The unique feature of this online shopping site is the company’s  commitment to sell discounted products and attractive promotions every day which has helped make it one of the leading e-commerce sites in Indonesia.

Investors:

Lippo Group is the main investor for mataharimall.com. The holding company was founded by Dr. Mochtar Riady in the 1950s. Later, it was developed into private and public companies operated around Asia such as  China, Hong Kong and Macao, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore and South Korea with total assets worth US $ 11 billion. It was also listed on various stock exchanges in Hong Kong, Indonesia and Singapore with at least 15 subsidiaries.

The amount of investment for mataharimall.com was USD $500 million in 2014 for 3 operating years. This investment for mataharimall.com by Lippo Group was recorded as second biggest investment in e-commerce company in South East Asia. (The biggest investment goes for Lazada.co.id, amounted for US$ 686 million, then GrabTaxi For US$ 340 million and Zalora fr US$ 238 million.) Since its establishment, Mataharimall.com potential advantages are very clear. Where other startups must fight and crawl from the bottom, Mataharimall.com already had exclusive access to huge amount of investment and physical retail store networks nationwide.

 

How it works

To do shopping in mataharimall.com is pretty similar to other e-commerce websites. Firstly, you need to sign up for the account in  https://www.mataharimall.com/user/register  then verify your personal detail information. After that, you just simply browse into the category of listed products in the website, ranging from fashion items, household equipments, gadgets and so on. Next, you can choose delivery and payment methods.

The instant process of shopping is quite similar if you want to be a seller in mataharimall.com. First of all, you have to fill online form available in the website , include information about your store, products, category, amount of products, top brand products, address, website url, partnership type. After that, mataharimall.com will verify your information then your products will be listed in the website.

Since Mataharimall.com launched in September 2015, a subsidiary of the Lippo Group has collaborated with a French Criteo which provides online retargeting advertising technology. This collaboration has caused product sales grow 160 percent from month to month with the ratio of return on advertising costs (return on investment) of 900 percent, which is significantly driven by ad retargeting. Within three months since launching, mataharimall.com has offered 180 thousands product from 1,200 sellers and reached 200 thousand customers.

Competitors

Currently, there are four large online marketplaces operated in Indonesia: lazada.co.id, mataharimall.com, tokopedia.com and bukalapak.com. Given their large investments,  mataharimall.com has faced stiff competition with lazada.co.id, the giant marketplace and major Asian Amazon competitor.

In a press release published in metrotvnews.com, dated 26 March 2015,  mataharimall.com declared that in less than a month since the launching, the site has been getting rave reviews from the people of Indonesia. This enthusiasm was seen from the number of people who registered for the teaser page MatahariMall which was reaching hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Even if lazada is considered more experienced than mataharimall.com in doing e-commerce business, mataharimall.com stands out with its unique features called O2O concept, or online to offline. This feature allows customers to pay, pickup and return the online offers in one of the 132 physical retail outlets of Matahari Department Store nationwide. As part of the O2O service, mataharimall.com organizes e-lockers for the costumers to pick up and pay as well as return the products located in 199 cities around Indonesia. In addition, the company also has collaborated with PT Pos Indonesia, which enables customers to pick up and pay for the online products in 4.500 PT Pos Indonesia’s outlets.

Recent news from Lazada, however, caused quite a stir at Mataharimall.com. The e-commerce company Alibaba, from China, officially announced the purchase of the majority share of e-commerce Lazada Group valued at $ 1 billion or around Rp13 trillion to target Southeast Asian markets. In term of the competition among marketplace companies, Mataharimall.com beleives that the market of Sourtheast Asia provides lots of oppertunity for healthy competition. It was also an underlying ambition of Lippo Group, when entering the online retail business, to build the number one e-commerce company in the country. Facing this situation, Hadi Wenas as CEO of mataharimall.com has said in an interview that as a local player that has served merchants and consumers in Indonesia for the long term, mataharimall.com’s focus remains the same; to continue, invest and compete with an understanding of local culture and world-class talent.

Consumers

Hadi Wenas, CEO of Mataharimall.com has said that the company has two key insights into the  e-commerce consumers in Indonesia. Typically, Indonesian markets consist of two groups, those who live in and those who live outside the city. Furthermore, he explained, that there is a big difference in shopping habits between those two consumer demographics. Consumers outside the town, he notes, generally have very few insights when it comes to shopping online. So, mataharimall.com provides different approach to deal with customers from outside and from within the city.

According to the monitoring results of mataharimall.com in variodus regions in Indonesia, consumers in the city prefer the convenience of shopping and want their goods delivered directly to them. Part of what they find appealing about online shopping are the quick click and deliver services.  What is unique, however, to consumers outside the city or outside urban area, such as in Klaten, and West Java, are that these consumers want to take the goods purchased using mataharimall.com back into the store; a service called online to offline. Wenas stated that consumers outside the city are often just learning about e-commerce transactions and are looking  to develop greater trust in e-commerce services. They usually choose the cash on delivery (COD) payment options and and appreciate if they are given receipts of purchase.

According to Alexa.com, Mataharimall.com site is on rangking 4,762 globally and 62 in Indonesia. Most of the visitors who accessed the website are coming from Indonesia which accounted for 98.3% . While in easycounter.com, it’s stated that total daily visitors of mataharimall.com is 51.3 K and daily pageview is 122K. The numbers are lower compare to lazada.co.id which reachs daily visitors amounted to 745k and daily pageviews of 4.29M, though with Mataharimall.com’s advantages the race to market dominence is still on.