Here’s How A Singaporean E-Commerce Giant Tackling Alibaba’s Hegemony With Blockchain

By Rishma Banerjee

Mr Ku is of the opinion that blockchain tech will help in making the inner workings of his business much cheaper by allowing him to remove the fees currently charged to merchants. He believes that with time, this will attract more sellers to his platform. A payment system is also in the pipelines, for the e-commerce platform which will attract new shoppers and run on Qcoins, which are native to the QuuBe app.

Mr Ku told Straits Times that “more than 5,000 merchants have registered some 2.3 million products on QuuBe in the past three months.” and that the response was quite optimistic.

Even though Qoo10 isn’t the first e-commerce company to utilize blockchain, it definitely stands out.

In spite of maintaining a low profile, Mr Ku has managed to make his company number one in Singapore even with Amazon’s entry with Prime Now in 2017. Alibaba has also been making heavy investments in the country which has furthered Ku’s resolve to implement blockchain technology in an effort to change the paradigm. Blockchain technology will help Qoo10 to automate e-commerce transactions and reduce the human labour required for its everyday activities. Online shops will, in turn, be easier to set up. Trust will also be enhanced since all transactions and activity can be easily tracked on the distributed ledger.

Mr Ku is convinced that blockchain will expand his company tremendously, stating:

“I want to show the world that we can prevail by using technology, instead of throwing money around.”