MANILA – Voyager Innovations, the digital unit of PLDT and Smart Communications, has expanded its e-commerce platform TackThis! from a mere online store creator to an end-to-end online retail “concierge.”
TackThis! came into the local business scene back in January 2014 as a cloud-based tool that can create a basic online store in minutes. It takes care of everything in the back-end—from storefront design to shopping carts, all the way to payment processing.
Voyager, with sister companies PLDT SME Nation and PLDT Alpha, brought it a step further with the TackThis! Concierge, launched Thursday, to also cover logistics, online marketing, and even booking photographers.
Starting at a monthly fee P899, the premium plan pairs a business with TackThis! Ambassadors, which will take care of the nitty-gritties such as updating product inventory, processing of orders, verifying payments, and scheduling deliveries.
Ambassadors can also provide basic customer service, monthly sales reports and manage the ever so tedious task of looking for good photographers and models for product shoots.
The concierge service also includes store marketing via placement on Takatack, the sister site of TackThis!, billed as the largest online shopping discovery platform with 300,000 products. Unique to Takatack is it aggregates and promotes products in other online stores including Zalora and Lazada.
A full online shop can be deployed in around a week. Asked on how TackThis! earns, Padua said that they get a commission ranging from 15% to 30%, depending on the scope of work
The name “TackThis!” is based on its ability to have the online store “tacked” or embed on to any website, blogging platform, or even Facebook.
TackThis! is a technology from Singapore-based e-commerce company PayWhere, which expanded to the Philippines in 2013 with Smart.
While TackThis! is already comprehensive, Mitch Padua, vice president and head of digital commerce at Voyager Innovations, says that they wanted to give business owners more time chasing new ideas and less time on micro-managing the business.
TackThis! is mainly targeted at small to medium enterprises (SMEs), now at around 1 million to date. However, discouraged by lack information and costs, Padua shared that only 1% of them has a website, let alone any form of online selling.
An industry trend analysis released by BMI Research last July estimated that 82% of all Internet users in the country or around 22 million Filipinos shop online. Retail sales account for USD$ 207 billion, but only 0.6% accounts for online retail.
A 2014 study by Ken Research estimates that Philippine e-commerce can expect a 101.4% annual growth rate from 2013 through 2018 due to increasingly heavier Internet usage and mobile penetration.
