HOW SINGAPORE’S CAROUSELL TAPS ITS INNER SNAPCHAT

Selling your unused or pre-loved possessions online is nothing new. It’s a tried and tested business model, and companies like eBay, Alibaba, and Craigslist have been at it for years. So what made a bunch of college kids from Singapore think they were on to something new? The answer lies in this bit of knowledge: in Southeast Asia, mobile is king.

Founded in 2012 by Quek Siu Rui, Marcus Tan, and Lucas Ngoo, three National University of Singapore students who had spent a year in Silicon Valley under the Overseas College Program, Carousell is a C2C mobile marketplace that simplifies the process: snap to sell, chat to buy.

“[We’re] a mobile-first platform developed for the Snapchat generation,” says Quek, who also heads Product and Marketing. “In Southeast Asia, where more people are experiencing the Internet for the first time through their smartphones, we have the opportunity to reimagine the way they buy and sell online. We’re reaching out to a generation of Internet users who leapfrogged the desktop Internet.”

There are over 26 million listings on the platform. Fashion and beauty products sell the most, while lifestyle gadgets sell the quickest, with laptops and tablets snatched up in a matter of minutes sometimes.

​

To date, they’ve raised a total of $6.8 million in two rounds of funding from seven investors, including Golden Gate Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Rakuten, and 500 Startups, according to CrunchBase. They’re in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, and, most recently, Hong Kong. Early this year they got JJ Chai, Airbnb’s former Managing Director for Southeast Asia and its first employee in the region, onboard to lead Carousell’s international expansion. Says Quek, “We have learned a lot in the past three and a half years and are ready to aggressively expand internationally.”

​

The importance of haggling in Southeast Asia

Carousell is “incredibly local,” says Lauria. Results can be sorted based on proximity to the buyer. “This was very different than how eBay thought about the problem.” This hits two birds with one stone: the absence of reliable logistics services like UPS or FedEx in many places in Southeast Asia, and people’s lack of trust in online commerce. “[It’s] still a young concept in this part of the world. Many consumers don't yet have 100% trust in buying online compared to retail outlets. So the 'local' solution allows buyers to meet the seller, and handle the item before making a purchase.”

The chat function allows for real-time interaction. “Many potential buyers start chat conversations with sellers to learn more about the item, or even to haggle on price. Here in Asia, the bargaining component has been an asset for both buyers and sellers who are used to more negotiations during a purchase than their Western counterparts,” Lauria says.

Another thing that sets Carousell apart, according to Quek, is that it’s a community marketplace. Through the Groups feature, for instance, people get to connect with others who share their interests. “We have die-hard Lego fans, bike enthusiasts, comic collectors, sneakerheads. Whatever your interest, you’ll find a matching buyer and seller. We also organize community meet-ups for our sellers to admire each other's collections, swap stories, and perhaps even arrange a deal.”

​

Competitors validate Carousell’s purpose

​

Similar peer-to-peer marketplace apps are cropping up in the region – Duriana, Tompang, and Shopee, to name a few.

​

But Lauria says, “Carousell understands the components of community much better than their competitors... If you look at the app stores reviews, you will see Carousell has passionate fans that love and promote the platform, while competitors tend to have more 'merchants' that are just using the competitor's platform as one channel for selling their goods.”

Incidentally, it’s precisely this engaged audience that convinced Golden Gate Ventures to invest. Says Lauria, “When we first invested in Carousell, the founders were just graduating from university, so it was a pretty early, high risk bet for us. Why we invested was in the numbers… Some users were spending 14 minutes in the app each time they opened it. With any marketplace, you have a chicken or the egg problem (how do you get sellers without buyers and vice versa). So while they hadn't had that issue solved 100% yet, they did solve the engagement problem and that really stood out to us. We worked closely with them on a number of techniques I learned in the valley in order to grow their two sided user-base.”

Quek is optimistic. “The launch of any other marketplace app is further validation that the problem we are solving is a massive one, and shows a real need for innovation in marketplaces that have traditionally only served the desktop internet users community.”