Ecommerce’s next wave, part 3 of 4: Qoo10
By Edward W. Mandel
For those who don’t follow the crypto market — and there’s roughly 7 billion of you, so no judgment — the big innovation of 2018 was the stablecoin. These are digital assets that are pegged one-to-one against the dollar or some other major reserve currency. Thus they provide all the advantages of cryptocurrencies without their one major setback: price volatility. Even if you haven’t been paying attention, you’ve certainly heard about how bitcoin went from under $1,000 to almost $20,000 to back below $10,000 in the matter of just a few months. (It’s trended down since then, but found sticking points all along the way.)
Although many of us at IOU.io, as individuals,are staunchly invested in crypto, that’s really not the purpose of this enterprise. Instead, we want to bring one key element of that space to the ecommerce industry: disintermediation. We want to give consumers and merchants the opportunity to gauge their counterparties’ trustworthiness — and self-assess their own — without bringing credit card companies into the picture with their usurious credit terms, and even without the useless interdiction of central banks.
Other e-tailers will find other advantages of cryptocurrency to apply to online commerce. And one of the best has just launched a service that proves the use case of stablecoins.
Only in Singapore
That retailer is Qoo10, which is one of Asia’s most highly rated and well-established ecommerce sites. Established in 2010 with antecedents going back to 2007, it might seem like a young company by any previous generation’s standards but is a venerated institution in the dog-years of this business.
If you’re in Europe or the Americas, you might never have heard of this company, but it’s big and very well known in the Asia-Pacific region. According to The Straits Times, the newspaper of record for Qoo10’s native Singapore, the online shopping destination ranks 4thon the list of brands with the most positive image. It holds a market share of almost one-third of Singapore ecommerce, according toSingapore Business Review, more than Amazon and Apple combined. An iPrice Insights study shows that the site has more monthly visits than any other online retailer in Singapore — and that’s despite mediocre app store rankings and virtually no social media game. Instead, it depends on that uniquely Singaporean formula of giving you what you pay for and being pleasant about it. That’s why it has also caught on in China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia and Malaysia.
(Random fact about Q0010: It’s partly owned by Haim Saban, the guy who also owns the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers franchise. It’s not important, but it’s cool.)
And, apparently, Qoo10 also relies on maintaining a technological edge.
On January 1, it launched Quube, which it described in a blog postas “Asia’s first online marketplace built on the blockchain.”
Playing with blocks
The blog post goes on to cite security of the wallet as the key benefit of going with the blockchain platform, plus there’s no need to worry about the value of Q*coin diminishing. As a stablecoin, it’s initially pegged to the U.S. dollar — although there are “plans to appreciate the token’s value by increasing the conversion rate, as more Q*coins go into circulation.” (Perhaps my economics teacher was wrong about currencies depreciatingin value as more of it goes into circulation, but this is a mere quibble.)
Actually, the blog post announcing QuuBe goes into much more detail about what’s in it for the merchant.
“As a seller on the QuuBe platform, you will be able to list your items and sell them for no platform or service costs at all. You will also get to convert your earned Q*coins back to currency for no additional fees,” the announcement continues, providing the emphases. “The amount of administrative manpower required on conventional e-commerce websites, including Qoo10, means that charging platform fees and sales commissions are unavoidable if the business intends to survive in the longer term. A blockchain-based platform, on the other hand, is able to utilise smart contracts to digitally manage many of these administrations. … Putting this automation in place greatly reduces the administrative manpower required, and consequently, its associated costs.”
According to a CCN article, Qoo10 will make money via QuuBe strictly from advertising, as there will be no merchant or transaction fees. Reporter Mark Emem goes on to state that QuuBe is quite the pan-Asian enterprise.
“Qoo10 boasts of 6 million daily active users who are mostly in Hong Kong, China, Malaysia and Indonesia,” he reports. “While the developers of QuuBe’s blockchain network are based in South Korea, the employees handling operations, sales and marketing are located in Singapore.”
A role model to look up to
This kind of success doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There are a lot of people out there calling themselves entrepreneurs, and a lot of them are very good at raising money from rich people, losing it and convincing the rich people to give them more money because they figured out what went wrong the last time.
Qoo10 founder Ku Young Bae, though, is the real deal. He started his career in that default position for very smart people who don’t mind long hours, hard work and extreme conditions: petroleum engineer. But the native of South Korea’s rural Jeollanam-do province, upon witnessing the success of Web 1.0 businesses, knew he could do better — and occasionally wear a suit to work.
“I looked at eBay but it felt like there are many things to improve on,” Ku told Tech in Asia. “It needed better features.”
Figure 2Ku Young Bae, the man who took on eBay — and won
Add time, money and hard work, and Ku’s entrepreneurial vision became a reality. And now he leads a multibillion-dollar company into the blockchain era, and the kind of reputation that is utterly beyond eBay’s grasp.
Sure, there also had to be a dollop of luck in the mix, but it doesn’t appear that’s what Ku relied on when he started up Qoo10. At IOU.io, we hope we have at least as much luck as he did, and we’re certainly going to put in the time and hard work. You can be part of the money-raising part of the equation by gettingwhitelisted for IOUX coins. But only the market can judge if my team and I have the same entrepreneurial talent as Ku and his team.
I’d be humbled by the comparison.
Edward W. Mandel is a strategic advisor for IOU.io , he is an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist, Blockchain Enthusiast and visionary behind many successful organizations. An avid entrepreneur, Edward has a knack for designing distinctive business models complemented with superior technology to deliver unparalleled service and profitability. Edward also has been advising and consulting for various successful Blockchain technology and ICO projects and recently launched his own BQT.io P2P Hedge Exchange helping traders connect with each other to leverage their crypto assets.
IOU is a blockchain-based peer-to-peer platform designed to unify ecommerce transaction and customer retention processes, incorporating trade-able IOUs. The platform can be found online at IOU.io and its community on Telegram at https://t.me/IOUCommunity.
