With his mind set to run a successful business in Taiwan, uitox founder Mr. Sie Jhen Fong left one of Taiwan’s largest online shopping store PCHome in 2012 and started uitox last year.
For those unfamiliar with uitox, uitox is an e commerce group which owns the ASAP brand in Taiwan, SoSoon brand in Singapore, as well as the Feiniu brand in Shanghai. uitox also provides electronic commerce services and fast delivery services for their products in the three main cities.
uitox has a huge ambition from the onset: it challenges not only the domestic market in Taiwan, but also the Chinese and American market. Mr.Sie and his team also shared with Vulcan Post that they are looking to build services in 200 cities in the next 2 years.
”We want to do global services. I think we do even better than Amazon.” said Mr.Sie.
His ambition to do global businesses has attracted a 800 million NT dollars investment in uitox, making it one of the largest investment in a Taiwan startup company since the dot com crisis in 2000.
5 hrs delivery in Taipei City and 24 hrs delivery in Taiwan
In order to speed up its delivery system, uitox has its own online payment system. While it still mainly depends on local delivery company and post office network, uitox owns its own delivery team. This enables uitox to support flexible needs for delivering products to customers.
uitox’s Global Strategy
You might be curious why the service name for each city are all different. Mr.Sie said the service name should fit the local market. Names such as “Amazon” sound more like an overseas brand. Thus, he emphasizes on having different names for different markets.
With the rise of mobile shopping, Mr.Sie still emphasize more on PC than mobile. He thinks that most of the orders still come from PC, and that mobile is something users only spend time browsing. However, this does not mean that he is underestimating the potential of mobile shopping. Interestingly, Mr.Sie hired a group of engineers without PC experience to build the website. These engineers are not affected by the PC framework. They can build the service with a 100% mobile mindset, and strive for the best user experience.
Mr.Sie joked that this is the advantage of startups: everything can be built from scratch.
Also read: Open your online shop in 30 seconds, says Taiwan’s newest online store platform