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<h4 style="text-align: justify;">Indonesia-based companies have ever-increasing opportunities to leverage digital channels, including e-commerce and social media, as part of their go-to-market strategies. With Indonesia being among the most socially-connected nations in the world, social commerce (i.e. utilising social technologies in order to enhance the buyer-seller relationship) will be a key driver of the overall growth of the e-tailing sector.</h4>
<h5 style="text-align: justify;">Indonesian shoppers want a lively, social shopping experience</h5>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Indonesia has an exceptionally social culture and despite (or perhaps because of) being geographically dispersed across thousands of islands, it is ranked by WebIndex as one of the global leaders in social media engagement.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In have been embraced widely at all levels of society, and Indonesians are more likely to upload content, create micro-blogs and connect with brands than any country apart from China.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">So what does this tell us about the way Indonesians like to engage in e-commerce? Simply put, they like to transact in a social manner. Sellers and buyers prefer to know each other well.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Drawing an analogy with conventional retailing norms, many Indonesians like to shop while chatting with the shop owners in the same fashion that they would do at “tokos” or local neighbourhood shops, as opposed to the more formal shopping style typical of the department store chains.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Similarly, independent merchants enjoy using the micro-blogging features integrated with e-commerce platforms in order to capture customer testimonials and to promote their products and services.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In turn, this creates a culture of ‘storytelling’ which resonates strongly with Indonesian consumers and introduces a powerful emotional tug during the shopping experience.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Rakuten, the Japanese-owned e-tailing giant recently released its E-commerce Index, an independent global survey into shopping trends, which showed that Indonesians exhibited by far the highest willingness (c. 78% of online shoppers) to share their purchases and to recommend products on social media sites via photo-messaging, tweeting or blog posts.</p>
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<h5 style="text-align: justify;">E-commerce becomes “We-commerce”</h5>
<p style="text-align: justify;">We have seen how social commerce can connect established social media applications with e-commerce to enable consumers to shop interactively with their friends and family members, emulating the conventional retail shopping experience.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">‘Going shopping’ is being replaced by ‘taking a moment to shop’, whereby consumers are able to find richer offers more quickly in the 7x24 online environment and correspond with their social circle as part of the overall e-tailing process.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Social commerce allows brands and retailers to sell where customers spend their time; and today that typically means on social media platforms. Social commerce solutions are thus a cost-effective way to capture traffic and market reach.</p>

<h5 style="text-align: justify;">Meanwhile, mobile is a key in-store enabler</h5>
<p style="text-align: justify;">As a growing number of customers enter retail stores with a smartphone, mobile is the de-facto technology for marrying together physical and online experiences.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">As such, it is critical for retailers to have a mobile-optimized online experience, and also consider other ways to energise the in-store shopping experience with smartphone and tablet-based tools.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The desired end game is that retailers will be able integrate online, mobile and in-store operations in order to create mobile-enabled solutions that offer customers such utilities as store navigation guides, personalised shopping lists, promotional offers, peer reviews, real time inventory data, bar code scanning, rapid checkout, e-receipts and ‘scan and go’ fulfillment services.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Mobile will increasingly play a role throughout the entire path-to-purchase in the store, with customers searching for products on their phone, scanning bar codes and expediting the checkout process in a seamless fashion.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The path to purchase is an ever more complex journey for retailers to manage, as consumers are empowered by mobile devices and the access to the wealth of information that they provide. Consumers might browse in store, read mobile or offline reviews and subsequently purchase online. In any event, retailers cannot afford channel conflict.</p>

<h5 style="text-align: justify;">It is important to understand the psychology of social shopping</h5>
<p style="text-align: justify;">There are several psychological drivers underlying the social shopping phenomenon, which properly harnessed by merchants can further improve the propensity to purchase on the part of consumers:</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">By providing online consumers with useful tools to make better choices, social commerce helps shoppers undertake smart and informed shopping.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">And in doing so, e-tailers can deliver shopper experiences that drive loyalty (purchase-to-re-purchase) and advocacy (word-of-mouth).</p>

<h5 style="text-align: justify;">Social commerce can redefine the traditional e-commerce model</h5>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Many pioneering e-commerce businesses in mature markets have been constrained on the path to profitability by a similar set of operating problems:</p>

<ul style="text-align: justify;">
	<li>High customer acquisitions costs, driven by the use of traditional media channels</li>
	<li>Low customer retention levels, whereby many buyers make one-time purchases only</li>
	<li>High upfront investment in product inventory</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The social web holds the potential to change the market place dynamics and business economics for agile and adaptive e-commerce providers:</p>

<ul style="text-align: justify;">
	<li>Pro-active word-of-mouth promotion among affinity groups ultimately reduces the costs of acquiring new consumers for merchants</li>
	<li>Peer-to-peer endorsements and recommendations stimulate both impulse and repeat purchase behaviour, thus enhancing the lifetime value of customers</li>
	<li>Smart analysis by merchants of social commerce transactions can create a better understanding of segment behaviour and preferences, which in turn drives product development and inventory planning</li>
</ul>
<h5 style="text-align: justify;">What to look for in a social commerce investment</h5>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Building a nationwide e-tailing powerhouse in Indonesia coupled with the necessary social commerce capabilities that can adapt to ever-changing customer preferences across multiple channels is no small challenge. However the winners in the e-commerce category will unlock a huge market opportunity in both the B2C and B2B2C sectors.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">With mobile platforms being the catalyst for the next generation of connected experiences, particularly in emerging markets, it is critical that the right organization, processes and infrastructure to facilitate a ‘mobile-first’ culture is in place.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Sophisticated analytics that leverage ‘big data’ assets will power the next wave of smart retail consumer applications and a strategic plan to acquire and leverage the appropriate talent is an obvious pre-requisite.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">o achieve the necessary blend of customer centricity and operational excellence, e-commerce providers will be required to configure their enterprise architecture for maximum flexibility and fluidity so that data can be processed, refined and interconnected throughout the entire systems framework. In reality, this implies the integration of the content management system with the e-commerce platform, the ERP system and the data analytics platform - all in real time.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">It is necessary to look no further than the example of Alibaba in China to understand that e-commerce marketplaces become both highly profitable and very robust once they achieve critical mass.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The race has started in Indonesia.</p>
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