Add to cart, checkout, receive, repeat. Yes, online shopping sounds much, much easier when you’re the one making the orders. But for online sellers — ranging from mom and pop stores to multinationals — the road to seamless digital retail experiences requires very specific skills and technologies. This is where companies like GoCommerce step into the picture.
Established by brothers Ryan, Mark and Neil Tan in 2020, GoCommerce is an end-to-end eCommerce growth partner that enables businesses to market, sell and fulfill orders for their brands using the latest omni-channel technologies. Aside from building and managing flagship stores for global brands in platforms like Lazada or Shopee, the company specializes in creating more curated online buying experiences through a brand’s own platform and offers services ranging from product storage to automated fulfillment of orders.
“We’ve started dabbling in e-commerce since 2015. One of our companies has been working with Lazada, at a time when Lazada was not yet the giant that it is now,” starts off Ryan, who serves as the group’s CEO. “However, seeing the shift brought about by the pandemic inspired us to broaden our services and build a standalone company because we saw that this is where the market is going.”
A whole new (online) world
As businesses big and small began to migrate online due to the pandemic-induced shutdowns of traditional retail points, many created social media selling accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Shoppee), enlisted their products in commercial sites (Lazada, Shopee, Zalora) and even restructured their websites to actually sell items.
GoCommerce took these things a step further when it launched in 2020. “Aside from creating online selling platforms for brands, we integrate all of their online assets so that they could sell and fulfill orders automatically, without having to involve themselves in certain processes such as packing, shipping and the like,” says Ryan.
This is particularly handy for big businesses who used to sell products to individual distributors in bulk, and home-based sellers whose businesses grew overnight during the pandemic.
Neil, the company’s COO, also explains that they take care of logistics services and warehousing of items. “When you think of online selling, it’s easy to imagine home-based sellers with a handful of products. But there are also big companies who don’t sell by the piece; or startup entrepreneurs who may not have expected to grow as fast as they did in the new normal, and are suddenly swamped with huge orders,” he explains.
To fulfill these orders, Neil says that GoCommerce created a system that gives online sellers flexibility — whether they’re upstarts on the rise or multinationals such as Unilever, whose warehouses were designed to ship by cartons or pallets. “We integrate with their various online channels and they send us products which we then store in our warehouses. Whenever somebody orders from them, our system enables us to automatically fulfill it. That’s the kind of convenience we bring,” adds Neil.
Meanwhile, Mark makes sure that the company is headed in the right direction by closely monitoring their investments and completing due diligence before entering new partnerships. “I manage the assets of the company, which can be quite challenging since it has so many moving parts and so many things that need to be held together,” he says.
Mark, who has also handled finances for some of the brothers’ other ventures, also plays a crucial part in ensuring that all inventories are accounted for on a day-to-day basis. “We work with so many brands and handle thousands of transactions every day. For me, it’s important to keep track of various aspects of the business and make sure that everything is always up-to-date and accounted for,” he adds.
Ever-changing, ever challenging
While this trio seems to have perfected the science of online retail, they, too, admit that the online world can be quite a fickle one. “You think you know online commerce today, and the next quarter, things would be different,” warns Neil.
“That’s why it’s important for us to keep an eye on where online businesses are going. We are always on the lookout on how else we can create easier and even more pleasurable digital shopping experience,” adds Ryan, who reveals, for one, that consumers are now expecting instant satisfaction. “We are doing this for some of our web stores today. When customers order, they get the product within the day.”
Such a pace, according to Mark, would prove challenging for many companies who have built empires in the traditional business landscape. “In some cases for large companies, their size may pose difficulties in scaling online. We work with brands to help them translate their offline success to online fast. We enable them to move fast, make decisions fast and scale fast. GoCommerce has made it its mission to help brands have agility by leveraging on our experience, culture, technology and continuous R&D,” says Mark.
With these said, the company is now training its sights on helping Filipino brands do cross border eCommerce by helping them gain access to other markets in Southeast Asia. “That’s the beauty of e-commerce. It’s really a borderless world, where traditional bottlenecks and limitations need not apply — if you are able to find the right solutions,” concludes Ryan.
