How Obbo Marketplace is Disrupting The Dropshipping Industry in Singapore
B2B buying and selling, as we know it, is undergoing a technological facelift as we speak. With more offline businesses realizing the perks of going digital, we are inevitably entering a completely different era. Whilst B2C dropshipping giants such as Shopify and Amazon preside, B2B is holding its own as an industry niche to be reckoned with.
As a small yet highly progressive metropolis, Singapore is right at the heart and centre of this unique revolution. Alongside B2C players such as Carousell, Lazada and Shopee, 2019 alone has seen the rise of different B2B marketplaces on the market.
This brings us to a key question: what makes Obbo Marketplace different from other marketplaces? Quite simply, we advance the term ‘selling online’ as a social cause for fellow entrepreneurs. When our founders, Sam and Jake, met for the first time, they realized that there was a current need in the entrepreneurial community for a brick-and-mortar business that was just as social as it was visible. So how did we make this unique vision more tangible to our end-users? Read on.
What is Dropshipping?
Before we elaborate on our methods of disrupting the dropshipping business, let us delve into what dropshipping is. Dropshipping, in the most conventional sense of the term, is a direct fulfilment method whereby stores selling certain products do not keep the products they sell in their immediate inventory or stock.
In essence, the store operates as a middle man of sorts between the merchant and the customer by purchasing the item from the merchant and shipping it out directly to the customer. Thus, the merchant never sees or handles the product in the transaction. Dropshipping merchants tend to be wholesalers, manufacturers or other intermediary retailers.
Direct Connection to Businesses
So we’ve understood how dropshipping merchants dropship in general. However, how does Obbo disrupt this traditional industry? As great as disrupting a specific niche of procurement sounds, we are not merely another B2B marketplace with a highly specialized technological offering.
Instead, what we are and aim to be are prime mediators in the Singaporean corporate digital ecosystem. We achieve this by positioning ourselves as influential consultants in our chosen niche, providing industry-relevant advice to our SME clients to help their online presences flourish in this fast-paced digital era.
A Marketplace Beyond a Niche
What makes Obbo’s model of a B2B marketplace so great is our versatility. We do not simply focus on specializing in one vertical but prefer being a one-stop-shop for various industries. We list products and services for the automotive, agriculture, computing, electrical, F&B and medical sectors amongst many others.
Through a simple, functional yet impactful interface, we ensure that our business users can easily find out more about specific products on the market. We have even created a unique algorithm that helps them find a good product/seller fit for requests and quotations. Bulk orders can be made at just the tap of a button with no registration or transaction fees. We feel it is this convenience that makes our model of creating a marketplace so accessible and pleasurable for our suppliers and buyers alike.
Connective Entrepreneurism
As mentioned earlier, the team at Obbo feels strongly that it is our social responsibility to be a hub of connectedness for our buyers and sellers alike. Our founders couldn’t be more passionate about this end goal:
“From the procurement and buyers’ perspective, we have created in-built connectivity tools for them to interact with the sellers and make a purchase quickly and seamlessly. What keeps us going and motivated is the fact that these feedback and enquiries are coming in daily and we have observed how two sides of the users (both buyers and sellers) are benefiting from the platform.”
Enabling our customers to interact with one another on an endless digital loop has helped us be the local B2B marketplace transformers of tomorrow. As such, we do not see this seamless interconnectivity ending anytime soon.
A Business Marketplace for Digital Visibility
Given that our SME clients are continually seeking to better their entrepreneurial endeavours, the Obbo vision has not just been about creating a marketplace for the sake of following the trend. Given the lengths that digital transformation has traversed, we understand our clients’ need for greater visibility and presence.
Following this need, we have styled ourselves as marketing gurus for our clients and provided them with highly effective marketing insights and advice to aid them in their entrepreneurial journey. In this way, we feel that we create a more hospitable environment of value exchange that all our end-users, buyers or sellers, can benefit from.
So where does Obbo see itself going over the course of 2019? We wish to implement more critical strategic goals and deep tech-focused initiatives for our SME clients to support the array of products and services on the marketplace. The process may be laborious. However, at Obbo, we believe that when we find passion in what we set out to do the process ultimately becomes sweeter.
Obbo, the acronym for Offline Businesses Backed Online, is a digital discovery and marketplace platform, with a simple mission to digitise and help local brick-and-mortar businesses and small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) to do business globally, digitally. Check out https://obbo.sg to find out more.
