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Comment by 2323235555667 | Hacker News Reader

I guess you mean South Asia (which really just means India) and not SEA.

I can’t speak for India but e-commerce in SEA is like it is everywhere else.

Also, it’s very doubtful that people shopping at NY boutiques at a premium would not be comfortable with English and that ‘native language’ would be worth the effort.

I live in SEA and when I want to shop — provided I’m too lazy to drive 5 miles to a JV, Polo, Fendi, Prada, Hermes, etc boutique — I can order from a local boutique / brand online.

No one I know cares enough about boutiques in other countries to pay a premium, risk sizing issues. Generally people affluent enough to try to keep pace with trends in other markets travel enough to shop in them in person.

Did you just make that up?

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> I can’t speak for India but e-commerce in SEA is like it is everywhere else.

In the West we use credit cards and our payment systems are based around that. We do not do live video selling as a part of the commerce. Our platforms are optimized towards static image-based shopping carts with text describing products.

> Also, it’s very doubtful that people shopping at NY boutiques at a premium would not be comfortable with English and that ‘native language’ would be worth the effort.

They are broadcasting QVC-style out of New York boutiques to their viewers in Vietnam, China, India, Cambodia, Thailand.

> No one I know cares enough about boutiques in other countries to pay a premium, risk sizing issues. Generally people affluent enough to try to keep pace with trends in other markets travel enough to shop in them in person.

Good luck getting Dry Clean Only, BHH, Minions, Mia Vesper, Chen Peng etc by dropping by your local boutique.

In India, we use similar e-commerce platforms to the West and are probably more advanced in the payment infra with the advent of UPI (Unified Payments Platform).

UPI is an interface that any bank or wallet app can use to allow individuals or businesses to send money to a mobile number or UPI Id.

UPI isn't more advanced. It's just different. If there is a compelling value preposition for it to disrupt credit card payment processing, it will be adopted. The financial incentives have to exist, though.

On the contrary i have seen a lot of growth in live video based sales in the US, the younger generation seems to really like it. Ive seen IG boutiques move $100k in product in under an hour, many times.

This is the exact reason why tech people fail at business - their numbers are way off scale.

100K per hour for 50% of the hours $432,000,000 per year. Total worldwide revenue of LVMH for 2019 is 53.7B euros. At 100k/h for 50 percent of the time it that mystery IG seller is at nearly half a percent of LVMH revenue.

If you can give an NYC boutique owner targeting a luxury market ability to sell 10-20k for 2-3 hours a week of their time based on your audience and you can replicate it across different subsections of a luxury market, you will be picking up clients until the cows come home. Of course not single client would actually be able to do more than 2-3 hours a week of sales at most because they simply won't be able to get the product needed to resell. The LVMH-like supply chain is corporate and it is not sold via random channels, so each of the successful luxury boutiques has their own developed contacts with the designers/producers who have very small ( measured in single digits ) manufacturing capacity ( it is however or maybe because of it commands LVMH-level and even higher pricing and higher than LVMH level margins).

Tech platform part here is 100% irrelevant. Building the sales platform on a top of shopify would have had the exact same results.

Traditional e-commerce is absolutely ubiquitous in SEA. Their primary e-commerce channels are web-page and app-based shopping carts, just like we have in the west. While it’s typical to support local payment methods, most sales are processed via credit/debit cards, just like in the west. Non-traditional channels certainly exist, but they are absolutely a fringe channel. Tupperware Parties are still a thing in SEA (although they’re mostly for MLM products), and a lot of businesses will let you order via DM, but those sales are nothing compared to the volume on sites like Shopee, Lazada, Tokopedia... They caught on a bit later than the west (I was personally involved in one of the first major e-commerce sites in a particular SEA economy), but their growing middle class does online shopping pretty much exactly the same way we do.

The OP's company targeted luxury market. It has nothing in common with Shopee, Lazada or AliExpress.

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