E-Commerce Market Place Buyon.Pk Is Targeting Rural Areas
E-Commerce Market Place Buyon.Pk Is Targeting Rural Areas: Buyon.pk, a mid-level e-commerce marketplace start-up, is aiming easy online shopping for the people of rural areas in Pakistan, where more than 100 million people reside, to encourage consumers to use its platform for online purchases.
Buyon.pk was among five start-ups that were invited by e-commerce giant Alibaba to China for the second eFounders Fellowship, a joint initiative of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) and Alibaba Business School to train 1,000 entrepreneurs in developing countries.
“The central issue for Pakistan’s e-commerce sector is the industry’s inability to truly scale and cope with challenges like quality control, logistics, inventory management, traditional vendors with legacy systems and an overall trust deficit,” said a research on e-commerce conducted by invest2innovate (i2i).
Industry experts differ on the size of e-commerce in Pakistan as the country has no proper means to collect authentic data.
E-commerce market En-countering many challenges and the biggest challenge was trust deficit between e-commerce marketplaces and consumers.
- The first reason behind this trust deficit is that all e-commerce players don’t keep their own inventory, instead they have adopted a light or zero inventory model.
- It depends on vendors whether they want to provide quality goods or not.
“Dealing with vendors is a big issue and keeping inventory needs a lot of investment,” said Buyon.pk Co-founder Anum Kamran.
Alibaba, which has acquired Daraz.pk, is making necessary arrangements and has bought 54% stake in Telenor Microfinance Bank, which runs Easypaisa payment and money transfer system, to provide payment convenience, which is another hurdle in the way of Pakistan’s e-commerce industry.
Based on research it would be most beneficial for new players looking to enter the e-commerce arena not to launch yet another platform, but instead focus on becoming the turnkey solution provider for existing players.
Efforts should be made to potentially provide additional value-added services such as data analytics, standardized Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and invest in sophisticated mapping and delivery algorithms that can make Pakistani supply chain more efficient.
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