How Cococart helps 20,000 businesses earn S $ 15M with its online platform – Wired PR Lifestyle Story

Online shopping has taken root as a way of doing things. That’s because people today stay within the confines of the home within safe distance measures and the default work schedule was to work from home.

For many businesses, having an e-commerce website is a must-have to keep your sales going.

That was the case with 31-year-old Derek Low when the pandemic shut down the Valio hotel business in 2020. He found homemade cheesecakes sold online in Singapore to raise money.

Although the UC Berkeley IT graduate had the skills to create his own e-commerce platform to take orders, he realized that other similar home businesses had difficulty doing the same.

Surprised that there was no e-commerce platform to help users quickly accept online orders without a mobile app, or that they don’t charge “high” fees and commissions, Derek and his partner Lim Zhicong agreed to make a single request. a platform called Cococart August 2020.

Today, Cococart supports more than 200,000 businesses in 80 countries and helps merchants support more than $ 500,000 in $ 15 million orders.

The business has only just begun to compete with global players, but the growth it has seen so far has been encouraging. For comparison, WooCommerce, an e-commerce plugin for WordPress, had an estimate 3.8 million merchants In 2021, while Shopify was a competitor 1.7 million merchants in the same year, in 175 countries worldwide.

“We built this platform to help other businesses accept online orders … With Cococart, they can set up a website with no learning curves,” said Derek, founder and CEO of Cococart.

Support for small businesses including Covid-19

Derek said Cococart’s selling point is that retailers can create a website to collect orders for their products online without the need for any coding experience.

The onboarding process is also not a big deal. All you have to do is visit the Cococart website and create a special link for your business. Once they have uploaded their products, delivery and payment methods, they can share the link and start accepting orders.

All aspects of the online ordering process (from order management to mobile payment solutions) are handled by Cococart. For retailers, this avoids what Derek described as a “logistical headache”.

We allow businesses to grow their sales and focus on customer enjoyment. We know that it is quite difficult to start a new business, and we want to help business owners succeed by removing the hard work of running their own business.

– Derek Lim, co-founder and CEO of Cococart

He added that consumers now expect to be able to order from their phones quickly and easily, which is why Cococart has taken off steam in the last year.

In fact, startups “grew 30 times in merchants and grew 46 times in customers” in 2021. Derek also blamed the growth of traders on his platform in the midst of the pandemic on the increase in the number of people who started his side-ups on the net.

“Like me, a lot of people who lost their jobs went online and then became their main source of income … The pandemic created a new generation of independent business owners, and these businesses are fast-growing e-commerce segments,” he said. said Derek.

INDOCIN, one of Cococart’s leading retailers, cited this as an example.

The Indonesian restaurant was the only show that operated from its kitchen when it entered the platform in 2020. It has now expanded to a group of 24 employees working in a commercial kitchen and retail outlet.

Touching the e-commerce boom

While Covid-19 is on its way to becoming endemic, Derek believes it will not affect Cococart’s continued growth. “People are very used to ordering online because of the pandemic. Even in an endemic situation, that habit will not go away,” he said.

“In fact, with the opening of retail businesses, we have seen many of them use Cococart as well. Now all kinds of businesses are using us because of the flexibility of our product, ”said Derek.

Cococart plans to expand its remote group further, spread across 10 countries. It has also been approved for the Y Combinator’s Summer 21 Batch – a launch accelerator like Airbnb, Stripe and Dropbox.

The founder added that the company’s goal is to serve 200 million small businesses worldwide which relies on phone calls or WhatsApp messages to collect requests, which he believes takes “so many hours that it can be better spent growing the business”.

“There are a number of challenges that we still need to address in order to get a business up and running, from shipments to supply chain financing,” he said.

“Our goal is to define the next generation of commerce.”

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Feature Image Credit: Cococart