Rocket’s new ecommerce site for Myanmar, dubbed Shop.com.mm, is a marketplace, which brings opportunities for shopkeepers and new entrepreneurs to open up online stores. While it doesn’t require a deposit to set up a store, it does take commission. The Myanmar store will have a central warehouse that merchants ship to, and then the firm sends the packages to buyers. It even handles payments, including cash-on-delivery as an option.
The ecommerce marketplace is similar to the Daraz.pk e-store that the company rolled out before in Pakistan. Aside from Myanmar, it will soon launch in Bangladesh as well.
With few people online (1.2 percent of the 53 million population, according to World Bank in 2013) and smartphones in the hands of a small percentage of the population, the prospects for online shopping look tough, the same source indicates. The company has already been operating on the local market since 2012 with several classifieds sites.
In related news, two startups in Myanmar received funding to help their online classifieds sites battle Rocket Internet in the country. MyanmarCarsDB and iMyanmarHouse got an undisclosed amount of funding from Malaysia’s Frontier Digital Ventures.
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