Philippine Startup PocketMarket.com Aims to Give a Social Storefront to Emerging Brands

Quezon City, Philippines, November 14, 2014 --(PR.com)-- There are a lot of young people who have great ideas for products that can even be recognized internationally, and we often see them selling in bazaars, pop-up shops or just referred by friends and family. Some ventured selling online, but most just use the internet as a promotional platform instead of a selling platform. Most of them are simply intimidated by the requirements of selling online such as setting up and maintaining an online store, managing payment gateway accounts, etc. Loud Panda Interactive wants to change that through their social commerce platform, PocketMarket.com.

With the funding of $500,000 from a local Angel Investor, LoudPanda Interactive aims to give emerging entrepreneurs a platform where they can quickly start an online business using their storefront plus instant messaging platform. “We want to remove the hassles of setting up payment gateways, and setting up an online store. We want to get these entrepreneurs who sell great products to start selling online NOW and make their products much more accessible to the huge online market,” says Paulo del Puerto, Director of Product for PocketMarket.

The Product:
Currently, PocketMarket has a Free iOS app and a Web Version that merchants can use to receive and reply to inquiries via the built-in chat functionality. All orders and payments are integrated to the chat thread so it’s easier for both the merchant and the buyer to refer back to the transaction.

Buyers, on the other hand don’t need the app just to browse, inquire and buy the items of the merchants, they can browse through the merchant’s Facebook Page or the Merchant’s PocketMarket Storefront.

Super quick and easy to start selling now; no online store setup required.
Online merchants just need to snap a photo of their item, put in the product details and the price, then promote the item on their Facebook Page. As soon as the merchant uploads products, they will get their own Storefront and Storefront URL.

The Storefront
Online merchants on Instagram and Facebook can now have a storefront they can call their own. As merchants upload their products and promote them using PocketMarket, their online storefronts are automatically populated. This saves them from the usual set-up process they have to go through using other selling platforms.

Engage customers at the right moment.
PocketMarket is centered around the social aspect of shopping (and selling), between the buyer and the merchant. We built a way for online merchants to connect with the buyers when they need them most: when buyer has questions about the product or the purchasing process. With the built-in instant messaging feature, merchants are notified instantly when users have inquiries about an item and they can immediately reply.

This opens up the opportunity for merchants to engage with their customers at the right moment, which can increase the conversion rate and strengthen the merchant-customer relationship.

Accept Bitcoins Payments
With PocketMarket, merchants can accept Bitcoin payments without worrying about its still volatile nature since the original price of the sale is deposited to the merchants’ bank account in pesos.

Accept payments through more than a hundred payment channels nationwide
Merchants using PocketMarket can accept cash payments through hundreds of payment channels such as banks, department stores, convenience stores, pawnshops, etc. With the Philippines having the one of lowest credit card penetration rate in Asia Pacific, this is a very viable model for merchants to bring their business nationwide (and even across the region). To set this up, merchants just need a bank account (now limited to BPI and BDO) where they want the proceeds of the payments to be deposited. Only a minimal transaction fee is charged per transaction.

Funnel inquiries from different online channels into the the app
With PocketMarket, merchants don’t need to give away their mobile phone numbers or emails just to receive inquiries. They can just include the Product Link (which they can super easily copy+paste from the app) in all their for sale postings on the web (and even on physical posters) and instruct their customers to go to that link to inquire using the built-in chat.

The aim to make online selling more delightful
Overall, PocketMarket aims to make selling online delightful by removing the usual obstacles startup online merchants face.