Ask an Expert Dec 15: Anurag Avula, Jeremy Khoo & Rachel Chan

[PayPal_Luna]

Hello there and welcome to our first Ask an Expert session!

Once in a while we sit down with e-commerce experts across the region, and this time we are excited to have some of the most experienced and inspirational online business owners around! Quick bio:

• Anurag Avula: Ex Paypal APAC Senior Director, currently CEO & CoFounder at Shopmatic Just about the best person for you to ask technical & design questions about online launch, operation and growth.

• Jeremy Khoo*: Founder & CEO at Dressabelle, Jeremy is well-versed in customer service and has previously been featured in this Paypal Headstart article.

• Rachel Chan: Founder & CEO at LIVE3LY, and director of Eggsplore. Having been in the online space for >15 years, Rachel is your digital solutions guru. You can read more about her in this Headstart article.

* Unfortunately Jeremy is not currently available to answer questions, but he shall be able to response in January. 

The three experts will be around on this thread to answer questions in the next 2-3 weeks. They will also sit down in a panel discussion later that will be filmed and uploaded.

Before we get started, I have a small surprise for you: We are giving away 10x US$100 Google Adwords vouchers to people with the most interesting questions! So you will be rewarded for getting your problems solved, how does that sound?

Detailed T&Cs for the giveaways are found here. If you haven’t read the board sticky post, I encourage you to do so. Now let’s get started!

[RachelChan · Accepted solution]

Hello Rachel,

Thank you for your interesting and trueful answers, especially on your “several months of sleepless nights watching my bank figures diminishing at a rapid rate”. Yes, this indeed is very true for most start-up.

Hope you don’t mind on these follow up questions; now that you have go through all these ups & downs, what advise will you give to your son/ daughter about their career life (with the intention of not going over the same mistakes and heart ache you went through)? And what things do you want them to learn from you? (Value, skills set anything..)

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As a parent, I am more concern about their character building. I hope to instill positive attitudes such as driven by passion, always ready to take on challenges, have a quick mind to find solutions, not be afraid of the unknown and most importantly, to be able to pick themselves up from failures. I don't think I will stop them from making the same mistake as I did, they need to learn things the hard way. I can only guide and advise to a certain extend. At the end of the day, it's their choice and freedom to choose the way they want to live their lives. Experience it, learn from it and grow to be a better & stronger person. 

[JustinNoel]

Productivy is a recipe to success. Anything special that you do to be more productive? I hope that this is something we can also do!

[Por]

In the future, everyone will use the same stragies in digital marketing.

The data we get will be analysised in the same way or similar.

Even we try so hard to come up with new ideas on services, promotion, and quality products.

But after we have done all of this, what else we can do more to leverage the available data in the most efficient way to generate more revenues?

[EmmaStarn]

Hi Paypal, I want to know the major risk that a beginner in ecommerce faces and solutions and what do I do when PayPal does work in my area of coverage. Yours faithfully EmmaStarn.

[GlutenfreeSG]

I was just wondering if the experts have any suggestions on eDM writing, as well as best practices to get consumers to subscribe, and stay subscribed to e-newsletters.

We have scheduled weekly eDMs to be sent out to all subscribers for the last 2 months. Whilst our subscribers are growing, it's at a lower than expected rates. Fortunately, there have been no one unsubscribing or making our eDMs as spam so far.

However, we are running low on ideas to what we can write about; when we first started out, we have a lot of new brands being added to our store. So this have been the main focus up until several weeks back, when imports have slowed. So we turned our focus to the coming festive season, and have been sending out eDMs with product recommendations for the holidays.

Eventually, I foresee running out of events to cover after February. Aside from product recommendations and holiday greetings, do you have any suggestions on what we can cover weekly to keep subscribers engaged?

Also, what kind of subject title would be best? Should it be straight-forward and simply cover what's in the eDM, or should we play with fun and quirky subject lines?

As for the body, should we be using more images than text? In your opinion, what would be the ideal image-to-text ratio?

[rodmart]

How can ecommerce be useful in a Real Estate Industry especially to the real estate professionals? Thank you

[edgarang]

Hi guys,

i see that all 3 of you have really great businesses and i would love to get advice from you guys regarding my e-commerce business.

Given that Singapore is a rather small market and the fact that I am currently in a niche industry (Martial Arts retailer), expanding my business and getting more sales is a problem because there is a huge portion of consumers who love to shop offline as this is an item that they want to feel and try on. Similar to the clothing industry, one of the difficulty in converting sales is cause by the consumers' need to feel the product. The issue becomes more significant when the product that I am selling is a high-ticket purchase ($100 - $500 for a pair of boxing gloves).

For local purchases, it is easy to resolve this issue by just having a good refund policy or even a physical store to try on the product. The main issue comes in when I want to expand my outreach internationally to other parts of Asia. Even though Singapore holds the reputation of having high quality product, I feel that it still a major deterrence to purchase a high-ticket item online for international customers. In this situation, what would you guys suggest that I do ?

Let me know if you need to know more background about my business. 

Thank you for all your opinions ! The vast amount of experience you guys have will definitely be helpful for me ! 

Hope to hear from you guys soon!! This is my website www.muaythaisgshop.com

[RachelChan · Accepted solution]

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@edgarang wrote:

Hi guys,

i see that all 3 of you have really great businesses and i would love to get advice from you guys regarding my e-commerce business.

Given that Singapore is a rather small market and the fact that I am currently in a niche industry (Martial Arts retailer), expanding my business and getting more sales is a problem because there is a huge portion of consumers who love to shop offline as this is an item that they want to feel and try on. Similar to the clothing industry, one of the difficulty in converting sales is cause by the consumers' need to feel the product. The issue becomes more significant when the product that I am selling is a high-ticket purchase ($100 - $500 for a pair of boxing gloves).

For local purchases, it is easy to resolve this issue by just having a good refund policy or even a physical store to try on the product. The main issue comes in when I want to expand my outreach internationally to other parts of Asia. Even though Singapore holds the reputation of having high quality product, I feel that it still a major deterrence to purchase a high-ticket item online for international customers. In this situation, what would you guys suggest that I do ?

Let me know if you need to know more background about my business. 

Thank you for all your opinions ! The vast amount of experience you guys have will definitely be helpful for me ! 

Hope to hear from you guys soon!! This is my website www.muaythaisgshop.com

---

Hi Edgar,

Before you explore into each countries, spend some time to understand your target group size, spending power and cost of living. I've faced issues where my pricing in SIngapore does not work in Malaysia. What I did was to understand my client's budget, my competitor's pricing and market size in Malaysia... from there, I find ways to lower my cost to offer a competitive pricing.

My suggestion to you is to explore working with a local high-end retailer where your consumers can try out the gloves/collect in store upon purchase online. Probably invest in marketing with local famous boxers to endorse your gloves, consumers are willing to spend big ticket items online if they see celebrities endorse your product.

Just my two cents worth of thoughts. All the best!

Yours sincerely,

Rachel

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