Page365 - F-commerce assistant for effective management of social stores

Sunday August 25, 2013 , 3 min Read

In the developing Southeast Asian countries, Facebook has taken an unexpected role – of being one of the largest e-commerce platforms. Thousands of young entrepreneurs looking to generate supplemental income have become online vendors, taking advantage of the accessible platform and leveraging the viral effect of social networking.

The flip side is that these vendors quickly find themselves flooded with hundreds of notifications on their pages and it takes hours to sort through all of them. After all, Facebook was not designed to be a storefront. Amidst this hassle, many potential customers inevitably get lost in the pool of posts, comments, likes, messages etc.

Trying to solve this problem, Lusarun Silpsrikul aka Trumph (23) and Prathan Thananart aka Pop (24) developed Page365 which is a dashboard for Facebook store pages that organizes notifications and comments into clean and intuitive interface. This gives vendors one-click access to all their past and present conversations, making it easier to track orders and conversations with customers. Page365 is powered by a natural language processing (NLP) and can process all the content of a sentence or text and convert it into an order, complaint or whatever it represents. This empowers the system to be able to do things like prioritizing content, in-depth analysis or even automated responses enhancing store's operational efficiency and profitability.

“The project began in late 2012 as a dirty hack for one of our friends. She was building a proper e-commerce website because Facebook was not designed to use for large amounts of customers. She bought an e-commerce site and put the URL to buy her items in every single Facebook picture to drive the traffic from Facebook to her new page. Surprisingly, the conversion rate dropped by about 80%. That's when we came up with Page365,” shares Trumph.

Looking at the customer behavior, Page365 was developed to keep the consumer experience unchanged. People do not have to leave Facebook and login to some other 3rd party system. Store owners get the benefits of CRM tools and automated responders. Though one challenge for Page365 is educating clients of what benefits Page365 brings to them. “As it is a new concept, it needs some explanation and convincing. This is even more complicated for western investors since the behavior of using Facebook as storefront normally doesn't exist,” says Trumph.

Trumph says that he pitched about 80 times before he got this first funding. They have raised a pre-seed funding and are in the process of negotiating for the next round. Based out of Bangkok and targeting the Thailand market, currently they are serving around 100 stores out of which most are local boutique stores. They charge stores based on subscription model and there are different plans available for several size of stores. Trumph says, “The market in Thailand for fashion and gadgets alone has the size of approximately 10,000 active stores. However, we are planning to expand to other countries in Asia as well, partnering with local companies.”

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