Advanced E-Commerce Lesson 2015 by founder of PChome(Taiwan’s # 1 marketplace) Chapter 1.2

By June Sim · 9th December, 2015

Lesson 3
Play as a distributor or carry own brand E-commerce?

E-commerce is the hottest trend in Malaysia now and everyone is crazy for it. Before we start to join E-Commerce, sellers need to decide to carry out a distributor’s role or carry with the own brand in their E-Commerce Path.

a.) When you play the distributor role in your E-Commerce…

Stock Keeping Unit(SKU) would be the key factor for driving more traffic to your online business.

Example: PCHOME (Taiwan’s Largest Marketplace)

PCHome keep 1.4 million product SKU in their own warehouse. Means that PCHome could provide up to 1.4 million products to their customers. This is the main strength of PCHome. Furthermore, the higher profitable products only come from the 20,000 products over 1.4million products. Thus, high SKUs is the key success of online distributor to sustain their business.

PC Home page

b.) When you carry with your own brand in your E-Commerce…

Standardise the brand commitment, brand image and brand experience. Those are all the must process to achieve your goal while you are doing brand E-commerce.

Example: XiaoMi

XiaoMi is a brand which is found online and also manufacture their own product. They just use their official website to be their only selling channel instead of setting up any physical shop as an offline distribution channel.

So, what is the success flow that XiaoMi did in its brand E-Commerce?

1. Create a set of story board about its brand. (Brand Image)

2. Standardise all the service flows to their customer. (Brand Experience)

3. Standardise the information delivery about its product or service (Brand commitment)

C.) Product Distributor + Brand E-Commerce

For sure, you can start your own brand E-Commerce without product manufacturing and only distribute the standard product in your online store. However, you have to set a clear unique selling point as your brand’s value.

Example: honest.com from Jessica Alba

honest.com positions themselves as a baby products distributor, however, the brand value of honest.com actually is telling the customer that they only selling “Quality” & “Certified” baby products in their online store. honest.com is a good example to show how distributor carries with a brand together.