JAKARTA. Online fashion retailer Zalora aims to widen its foothold in the country, targeting more customers outside the capital city of Jakarta.

Zalora, which has had a presence in the country since 2012, plans to set up offline stores in six or seven cities outside Jakarta next year. The stores, which will serve customers only for one or two months are known as pop-up stores.

“We will take our pop-up store [in Kota Kasablanka shopping mall, Jakarta] around Indonesia [...] to reach customers and for them to see our products,” Zalora Indonesia managing director Anthony Fung said in a limited press briefing on Tuesday.

Fung said the pop-up retail store concept was a way to provide opportunities for customers to touch and feel Zalora’s products so that they got a sense of Zalora’s products in order to build customer confidence.

According to a recent study by Google, 40 percent of Indonesia’s non-online shoppers are reluctant to shop online because they are worried about online payment systems and because they cannot personally touch the products they want to buy.

Zalora expected that by displaying products in pop-up store across the country, it could attract more customers outside Jakarta in the near future, Fung said.

The online retailer currently has more than 1 million unique customers in the country, 30 percent of whom are in Jakarta and the remaining 70 percent in a number of cities, including Medan, North Sumatra, Bandung, West Java, and Surabaya, East Java.

Fung said his firm expected to see a more even distribution in the number of customers across cities in Indonesia. With a growing number of customers from outside the capital, Zalora aimed to double its revenues every four months, he said.

He added that while Indonesia was currently still at a very early stage in e-commerce, the country would eventually reach the stage of a lot more people shopping online.

“I think Indonesia’s market is maturing quite fast. I think within the next three to five years we will see a lot more Internet users,” he said.

Advisory firm Redwing has predicted that the number of Internet users in the country will surge to 125 million people next year from 55 million people in 2012.

Zalora, which operates across Southeast Asia, regards Indonesia as its largest market so far. Fung said that to introduce more Indonesians to e-commerce, his firm would also join the fray with a number of online retailers in the national online shopping day on Friday.

Zalora, part of the e-commerce focused venture capital firm Rocket Internet, will offer discounts of up to 84 percent on 90 percent of its products during the day and is looking to see its revenues increase by five times compared to normal days.

Fung added that to cater to more diverse customers and to compete with competitors, Zalora aimed to have around 1,000 brands next year compared to its current number of just over 500 brands.

Zalora’s head-to-head competitor in the country, locally-founded Berrybenka, already carried over 400 brands as of September last year. (Khoirul Amin)

Editor: Barratut Taqiyyah Rafie