- AllSome is an e-commerce fulfillment platform that equips small to medium merchants with the ability to deliver products from suppliers to their clients in an efficient and timely manner, all without ever having to handle the product.
- This also works across borders, with AllSome placing special emphasis on China-based suppliers.
- Customers will always be able to keep track of their en-route purchases by linking with them with their phone numbers.
Shipment tracking—a task so seemingly simple, yet so wrought with all sorts of problems.
“What’s the hold up with my delivery?”
“When is my parcel due to arrive?”
“My tracking number doesn’t work.”
These are all questions that have plagued logistics for what seems like an eternity, and these questions are also what led Ng Yi Ying and Liu YiShu to found AllSome in 2016.
“Before we started, we were an online merchant that sold across e-commerce platforms such as 11Street, Lazada, and Lelong,” said Yi Ying.
“We conducted a dropship business model—where it usually took 7–14 days for shipments to arrive. During this time, our team usually spent half the day answering those questions.”
Bridging China To The Rest Of SEA
Now run by a team of four, AllSome is an e-commerce fulfillment system that provides small to medium online merchants with the ability to send shipments directly to their customers in a more timely and affordable fashion compared to more traditional models.
The unique feature of their service is their ability to handle shipments across borders, allowing them to be easily tracked even when overseas. Currently, this feature is focused on China, with their China-based deliveries handled through their fulfillment centre in Shenzhen.
On the consumer end, AllSome allows them to tie their various shipments to their phone numbers, essentially eliminating the need to visit multiple websites to keep track of deliveries.
“Simply, we receive packages on behalf of the merchants, check for quality, repackage them, and ship them out to the clients,” she said.
“The merchants only need to tell us what to do and we handle the rest.”
In many ways, AllSome’s service acts as an in-between for merchants and customers who respectively buy and sell products from suppliers in China. It removes all the unnecessary steps that slow down the e-commerce process such as quality checks, returns of defective products, and filling in consignment forms.
According to Yi Ying, while there are other e-commerce fulfillment services available, AllSome is at least 40% cheaper and 40% quicker when compared to more traditional fulfillment platforms.
“Although there are a lot of existing players within the same vertical in Malaysia’s logistics space, we’ve yet to find a competitor that uses the exact same business model as us,” she said. “Somehow we see the more traditional methods of fulfillment as our competitor.”
She explains AllSome’s business model as being an easy, low-commitment solution for merchants to use.
“They don’t need to understand the meaning of pallets and inbound scans, or how storage and racking works,” she said. “And we make it so affordable that everyone can start using it without any commitment.”
She also describes her business as being highly scalable due to its lightweight model and cross-border capabilities.
“We don’t actually require the heavy capital and investment to set up warehouses,” she explained. “And of course, we also help merchants who source from China reduce their risk and stay closer to their suppliers.”
Ultimately, AllSome Track wants to make things more manageable for all parties involved—merchants can just focus on selling, while customers will always be informed of the whereabouts of their purchases.
“We wish to help small to medium online merchants scale their fulfillment and logistic capabilities and reduce the barrier for everyone to enjoy e-commerce,” Yi Ying said.
“At the same time, we want to enable everyone to focus on what matters most in their lives—such as friends, family, and education.”
It Was All About The (Lack Of) Money
In the beginning, Yi Ying said the problem was all to do with finance. Although they had an idea and a plan, they lacked the required funds to execute them.
“The team agreed to invest in ready stock and resell them quickly to earn our first capital to last us for a while,” she said.
“But on the same night we completed our very first prototype, our home office was burgled. We lost around RM200,000 worth of ready stock products, equipment and smart devices. Our credit cards were swiped and we also lost our car.”
Following the unfortunate incident, the AllSome team were forced to re-purchase the necessary devices, leaving them nearly broke.
Even after recovering and getting their startup up and running, the team continued to face obstacles.
“We had problems trying to monetise our tracking system because people were not willing to pay for the tracking services.”
But these problems have been offset after their acceptance into MaGIC’s Accelerator Programme, where they gained some traction and credibility.
“Receiving that level of mentoring and guidance really helped us,” Yi Ying explained. “And not forgetting the free office space and monthly allowance.”
AllSome was also accepted into Batch XI of Chinaccelerator. This experience, according to Yi Ying, has helped them understand the Chinese e-commerce and cross-border market.
“The people, the mentors, and analysts we met at Chinaccelerator were passionate and professional,” she said. “They provided us with great advice and help to make things happen within the cross-border market in China.”
Yi Ying also detailed other steps that AllSome has taken to grow themselves.
“We also took pains to speak to almost 100 merchants through WhatsApp to understand what the customers really need.”
She said that in doing so, they have been able to design their product to better suit their market, which in turn has helped them with the monetisation aspect. Following this, they are now also actively looking getting invested into.
To date, AllSome has 2,000 registered online merchants, has tracked over one million shipments, and are helping to fulfil orders worth of RM500,000 every month.
“We expect to grow tenfold within the next eight months,” said Yi Ying confidently. “AllSome is aiming to occupy at least 50% of the e-commerce fulfilment market in Malaysia within the next year.”
“Next, we plan to expand to Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia.”
- For more information, check out AllSome’s website here.
Feature Image Credit: Chinaccelerator on YouTube