on Bede Moore

Bede Moore Aims to Bring Online Retail to Indonesia

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/archive/bede-moore-aims-to-bring-online-retail-to-indonesia/

Indonesia, as well as the rest of Southeast Asia, remains a hot spot for technology startups and e-commerce. Both local and foreign forces are eager to take a shot at the e-commerce business in a region largely untouched by industry giants such as Amazon.com.

Indonesia has a few e-commerce websites, such as Rakuten, Gmarket, Tokobagus and Blibli. 

The latest player comes from a German company called Rocket Internet, which recently launched Zalora and Lazada Indonesia. Zalora is a fashion e-commerce site, while Lazada is a general retail site with a focus on electronics and gadgets.

Lazada has also been launched in Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines, making its focus to the Southeast Asian market obvious. As a promotional strategy, Lazada is offering free delivery to customers’ doors.

Sydney-born Bede Moore is the co-founder and managing director of Lazada Indonesia. 

Moore was a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group when Rocket Internet made an approach in November last year to start the e-commerce company in Jakarta. Moore, a Harvard graduate with a major in Indonesian history, said he always wanted to work in Indonesia, so he accepted the challenge.

While still at university, Moore shared his room with a rather well-known tech personality: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. At the time, Facebook had not been invented yet, but Moore did get a chance to see how Zuckerberg, a computer science student, built something that people had never seen before.

Having seen how his former roommate changed the way the world communicates was a valuable experience. Moore, however, says in developing Lazada, the challenge really lies in providing acceptable payment methods and accurate logistics, which has become his obsession. 

The Jakarta Globe spoke to Moore about starting Lazada from scratch, how to handle skeptics and — of course — about his famous former roommate.

The small number of credit card owners would seem a particular challenge to getting an e-commerce business going in Indonesia. What are your strategies?

Yes, we [Lazada] are in five countries and I think I am in the best one. Indonesia is the most interesting market to be operating in. I think probably the Philippines and Indonesia are the most difficult. The difference is the Philippines has a couple of islands whereas Indonesia has more. The part of this business that I run is operation and customer service. These are the most difficult ones in terms of this market because there are a lot of Indonesians who are online and active, but the difficulties is the payment and how you get packages on time.

How do we bring the level of customer service that we believe in. In terms of the time that we have been around, the changes are already seen in the market. We have cash on delivery in 104 cities across the country. That really didn’t exist before as a customer option. We introduced that and it’s really popular with our customers.

Are your products going to be different from those on other e-commerce sites?

The real advantage is the range. We are not just electronics. We have eight different categories ranging from home living to cosmetics. It should be an online single shopping experience. We are making all of these products [available] to people in Indonesia now who have the money but can’t get access to them. We are making that possible.

Orders are delivered by Ningrat and First Logistics. Are these part of your company?

No. They are partners. We are working with these companies to make flawless execution. We are building a new mode of commerce in this country, and if you look at successful commerce across the globe, it has something to do with delivering the goods correctly. JNE has also come aboard to support us. To be honest, most of them are smaller products, getting products to people in Balikpapan, and we are also able to get a treadmill to a man in Papua. The challenge is to make sure that every part of the delivery works flawlessly. And to do that in a country where no one has done it before, obviously you’ll have difficulties.

Seeing that payment methods can be tricky, why did Lazada decide not to use PayPal?

PayPal is nominated in US dollars here, so if I were an Indonesian consumer and saw that my purchase is being converted to US dollars, I might be more unsure about it, right?

How do you handle criticism that Lazada is a copy of Amazon.com?

It’s not something that particularly concerns me. I think what we are trying to do is to be a general retailer online. If being a general retailer [means that] people think we’re Amazon, that’s fine, it’s their interpretation. What I think we are doing is getting hold of a bunch of products and trying to bring those to various people in this country. You can call it Amazon, I think that is retail. We are just doing it online.


Tell us about your former roommate.

It’s a funny story. It’s a good time for our room. There’s Samyr Laine, who is an Olympic triple jumper who is going to compete in the Olympics in a couple of days. It’s unfortunate because I contacted Mark 10 days ago, I wrote to him and said, ‘We have to go to the Olympics and watch Sam jump.’ It was a very interesting experience, I was his roommate in my first year. We were very different. I started at Harvard as a student of general history, and then I moved into colonial history. Obviously Mark was doing computer science, and Sam was doing government.

In freshman year he was working on another big project, Synapse, a music player app that learns about your listening habits. Back in 2002, it was a very interesting thing. He was negotiating with various companies about whether or not he was going to pursue that. In sophomore year, he roomed with Chris Hughes, who is in the film [“The Social Network”] and that was when he came up with Facemash and Facebook.

Did you know that you were going to work at a tech startup?

No. I get it from my writing days in ABC in New York in 2006. I found it fascinating to see with five huge monitors to track Web traffic. Obviously I have known the behind-the-scenes story of Facebook, and I know it’s a business phenomenon. It’s new, compared to palm oil, it’s a new commerce. I thought it’s great because I can be in a country where I want to be, in a new industry with new, young people.

Entrepreneur Profile: From Harvard to Indonesian E-Commerce with Bede Moore

http://www.powerretail.com.au/insights/entrepreneur-profile-harvard-indonesian-e-commerce-bede-moore/

• 22ND JANUARY
• CAMPBELL PHILLIPS
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Bede Moore’s professional and educational history has seen him travel the world. Now running his own e-commerce business in Indonesia, Moore explains how he went from sharing a room with Mark Zuckerberg to starting businesses in South-East Asia.

Australian ex-pat Bede Moore is the kind of entrepreneur that combines practical savvy, a deep business education and a penchant for the intrepid.

Moore’s journey has taken him from sharing a room with Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University, to starting retail brands for Rocket Internet in Indonesia. Now he’s started his own company, Vela Asia, which aims to provide services and solutions to other retail brands operating in the region.

While he was perhaps best known for his prowess as a rower during the Harvard years, Moore went on to work for Boston Consulting Group before being picked up by Rocket. His story typifies that of the worldly entrepreneur, and one can only wonder what project Moore will set up next.

Recently, Power Retail conducted an interview with Moore to discover a little more about his story.

Bede Moore

·      Australian Businessman and Entrepreneur

·      Managing Director and Founder, Vela Asia and Director of the Australian Indonesian Youth Association

·      Previously: Managing Director and Co-Founder, Lazada.co.id

What led you to consider moving to South-East Asia to pursue your career?

I studied colonial and Indonesian history, first during my undergraduate degree at Harvard and then for my MPhil at Leiden, where I was awarded honours. While I was studying in Leiden, I was looking at Australia’s relations with Indonesia during the Independence period, and I became really interested in the country and its history. I did research trips to Indonesia and decided I wanted to return at some point.

After my masters, I decided I didn’t want to go into academia, so I started working for the Boston Consulting Group (alongside Iconic co-founders Adam Jacobs and Cameron Votan) and did a lot of work for them in retail and industrial goods. My partner and business co-founder, Susie Sugden, was also working for BCG, and we asked them to move us to the Jakarta office in 2011. We worked briefly at the BCG office in Jakarta and were then headhunted by Rocket Internet to launch the local version of The Iconic, Zalora Indonesia. We then moved across to found Lazada Indonesia, which is now one of the largest e-commerce players in the country.

Rocket was an excellent experience and we learned a great deal, and it inspired us to become entrepreneurs. In late 2012, we decided to launch our own business, Vela, which provides end-to-end e-commerce services for brands, manufacturers and retailers.

Were there any major challenges you had to overcome in making the move?

Absolutely. In my experience, it is very easy to underestimate the difficulty of operating in these markets. Customs and expectations are very different from the West and it takes a great deal of time to understand them and be sensitive to them. Given my academic background, and a brief period working for BCG here, it was certainly easier to start operating as an entrepreneur, but it’s a never-ending process of learning. I think the biggest challenges in e-commerce have been the industry’s novelty, the lack of critical infrastructure (eg payments) and the immaturity of the logistics market. These are issues which directly impact all e-commerce entities here.

Our advantage as a company is that we have now got more experience operating in this environment than almost anyone else. It is simply through time and experimentation that we have come to understand how to work here, what things work and what things don’t. This is the value we bring to our clients: we know more about how to do e-commerce in Indonesia than almost anyone else.

What were your initial thoughts about the South-East Asian market, and has this changed over time?

We knew from the outset that Indonesia was going to present a huge range of opportunities. In fact, one of the things that surprised me early on was how few people have tried to come here and to take advantage of what is occurring. I think that’s because they are nervous about entering, which was part of the driver for setting up Vela – we knew foreign brands and manufacturers would want to work with a company that could provide them international levels of service in a developing market. The interesting thing is how quickly attitudes are changing.

Two years ago when we first started working in e-commerce, people would say, “Oh, Indonesia’s not ready for e-commerce. It will be at least ten years until it works here, if ever.” Now we are run off our feet speaking to major retailers who want to find out how quickly they can get online. It’s been an amazingly rapid change and it has certainly confirmed our earlier convictions.

Timeline:

• August 2011: Moved to Indonesia with BCG
• November 2011 – September 2012: Co-founded Zalora.co.id and Lazada.co.id
• September 2012 – present: Launched Vela

What is Vela and how did the opportunity come about?

Vela provides end-to-end e-commerce services to both local and international clients. We offer turn-key e-commerce services to Indonesian and international companies operating (or desiring to operate) in the Indonesian market by providing all the functions a business requires to operate in e-commerce – we offer website development, online marketing, order management, warehousing, distribution and reverse logistics. Companies can pick and choose specific assistance they require (eg. online marketing or warehousing and distribution) or they can simply outsource their full e-commerce sales channel and we will operate it on their behalf. We also provide market entry assistance to companies looking to enter Indonesia for the first time.

In terms of the opportunity: my co-founder, Susie Sugden, and I were both working in e-commerce in Indonesia and we saw that there was a huge gap in the market for companies who needed help establishing and operating their e-commerce presence. The market is still quite young and there is a capability shortage, and we recognised that companies would require assistance navigating a new mode of commerce. It’s been an incredible ride.

What technology or other challenges have you overcome in creating this business?

As you might expect, Indonesia is a developing economy across all fronts, and technology here is no different. In building Vela we have focused on developing new technological solutions that address critical gaps in the market and which ensure a better experience for our clients’ customers. We’ve developed two market-leading products: Hari Ini (“same day”) and DART (Distribution and Retail Tracking). Hari Ini is the first real-time package tracking system in the country and it is used by our own courier fleet inside Jakarta.

One of the big problems caused by bad infrastructure is that deliveries are often late, and this bad customer experience is compounded by the fact that none of the major couriers are able to offer real-time tracking. By having our own couriers and providing up-to-the-minute information about packages, we are directly dealing with one of the key customer experience challenges in Indonesia. 

Likewise, our DART system provides our clients with real-time information about their orders, their inventory and our performance. This was another huge problem working with local suppliers – it’s impossible to get reliable, quality information about how your vendor is performing. We think that transparency for our clients is a vital part of the service we offer them, which is why we developed a tracking system to all them to see what we’re doing at any moment.

What unique aspects of Vela are there that may not appear in an equivalent western market business?

In building Vela we have tried to bring internationally-competitive levels of service and transparency to our clients, which is a unique approach in this market. What makes us different from a services provider in the West is that we also need to accommodate for the unique challenges presented by the local market. The best example is probably courier management. In Indonesia, courier performance is patchy and unreliable and On Time Delivery (OTD) is very low compared to developed markets.

One of the specific services we offer is to manage the distribution providers (including doing many of our own deliveries). This means managing multiple couriers, identifying their strengths, trading volumes between them to ensure optimal performance – it’s a data-driven and time consuming process that is not really necessary for e-commerce players in developed countries.

What challenges are you currently facing and how do you predict this may change in the next 12 months?

I’m not sure if you would call it a ‘bad’ challenge – we are growing very quickly and need to be nimble to address all the needs of our various clients. This is a great challenge to have and we feel confident it’s not going to change anytime in the next 12 months. If anything, the growth is only going to get faster.