Digital Mall of Asia: An innovation that can revolutionize India's e-commerce market

In a move which will transform the global retail market, Digital Mall of Asia (DMA), a first-of-its-kind digital e-commerce platform merging the real estate and the digital spaces, is introducing an innovative business model to disrupt India’s foreign-dominated e-commerce market. The unique initiative has been undertaken by Yokeasia Malls and is aimed at addressing the challenges faced by retailers and shoppers on major e-commerce portals.

DMA is recreating the look and feel of a physical retail mall in the virtual space, thus providing retailers across India a unique opportunity to create an immersive digital presence in a simulated environment. The digital space will come perfectly blended with multiple visual and sensory elements to deliver enhanced end-user experiences. Shoppers will also have access to much more choices in terms of their shopping experience and will be able to virtually move through exclusive towers of digital retail shops, trial rooms, hypermarket, night clubs, food courts, and much more.

More importantly, however, DMA’s virtual ecosystem will operate on a zero-commission model. Unlike other major e-commerce platforms, no commission will be charged for transactions driven through the DMA platform; retailers have to only pay a fixed rental amount every month. This will enable retailers to sell products at the cheapest price possible, allowing them to drive superlative business growth and improve profitability. Customers, on the other hand, will benefit from the higher affordability that this facilitates.

Furthermore, since each retailer on the DMA platform will enjoy the exclusive rights to sell a particular product category or brand in their respective city, it will eliminate the artificial hyper-competitiveness that is the norm on major e-commerce portals. Retailers will also be able to settle their payments immediately in a reliable and transparent manner.

DMA will also allow retailers to seamlessly integrate their offline inventories to its e-commerce portal, leveraging the strong local presence of physical retail stores to ensure faster order fulfilment. It will also eliminate the issue of counterfeit goods by enabling shoppers to check the product first before making a payment. The approach also improves overall trust and reliability – something which is severely lacking at present in the Indian e-commerce ecosystem.

Talking behind the idea of a virtual mall, Mr Rishabh Mehra, MD & CEO-Digital Mall of Asia said, “The idea of introducing a virtual ecosystem is to reshape the general outlook of retailers towards digital e-commerce. Our objective is to offer retailers a safe investment platform where they can sell products and get attractive returns. It is also an effort to give shoppers the power to own their data and define their online shopping experience. We are already in talks with almost all popular retail brands such as Raymond, Calvin Klein, Indian Terrain, Allen Solly, Park Avenue, Ed Hardy, Mufti, among others, to provide the most comprehensive and unique digital shopping experience to Indian customers.”

Rishabh added, “We are looking forward to incorporating modern-day technological tools like Augmented Reality (AR) into our framework to enhance the user experience. Our association with Robosoft Technologies will ensure that retailers can provide unique and seamless shopping experiences to customers while growing their online business in a robust, scalable, and reliable manner. Once we accomplish the successful implementation of our virtual ecosystem across India, we plan to replicate this model in other emerging Asian markets as well.”

DMA plans to take this unique digital ecosystem to 8 more countries – China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia – in the near future. Each of these locations will have a separate virtual mall catering to its respective audiences, thus completely reshaping the way the retail industry in Asia operates.