e-WorLDBiZ

10 years down the road, Lelong.com is one of the earliest e-commerce companies being set up in 1999. This auction site was mostly filled with gadgets ranging from personal computers to mobile phones, anything from household appliances to electronics goods to toys, including used and new products. Today, Lelong.com achieved more than 31 million pageviews and a million unique visitors a month. Undoubtedly, Lelong.com is Malaysia’s biggest and most active Internet auction site. According to Richard Tan, the number of people trading online is growing and e-commerce is more popular among the younger generation. Around 80% of their members are below 35-years-old.

Key Success Factors
Richard Tan believes its success comes from ensuring Lelong.com’s business is built firmly on trust. “That’s the main reason people keep coming to our website for trading,” he says. One of the key success factors according to Richard Tan was their stringent security measures. He claimed that, in order to build trust between sellers and buyers who use the site, Lelong.com does not allow its seller to be anonymous. As for your information, there are many other sites and forums that allow seller to sell if they insist on anonymity. Lelong.com ensures all sellers go through a stringent verification process to guarantee a safe shopping environment for buyers. It shows how serious Lelong.com is on the issue is the security tagline on its website – “Guilty as Fraudster – Until Proven Not.” Though there is no such thing as complete security, but Lelong.com strives to reduce the risks to a large extent. Due to all these measures, there are hardly fraud-related complaints from users of the auction website, and the most complaints that they received do with shipping delays.

Another key success factor of Lelong.com was they do not charge a listing fee or earn sales commissions for its services. It only sells advertising space and charges customers who want their product to be prominently featured on the site, a small fee. Users can list items free on the site with only premium features, having a reserve price and offering Dutch auctions incurring charges. With RM 168 a year, users can set up an online store at Lelong.com. Richard also claimed that the toughest part in e-commerce business is not building a website but attracting traffic to the site. Thus, being in the Featured section could make a difference as it makes your items to stand out from the crowd, which is why they charge for the service. Moreover, Lelong.com retains its “For Malaysians only” clause is to enable it to have better control should there be incidents of fraud.

I believe Lelong.com will continue to chalk up more milestone in the next decade, as e-commerce is getting more popular as time goes on.

Reference:

http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2008/5/20/itfeature/1208205&sec=itfeature