Blanja.com

» see blanja.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Telkom Indonesia and eBay set up a joint venture called PT Metra Plasa on 17 September 2012, with the state phone company holding sixty percent and eBay the rest, plus an option to buy more. It took two years to produce anything. Blanja.com launched on 8 December 2014, onto the web address Telkom's sixteen-year-old portal had been using, and the funding behind it ran to a few hundred billion rupiah.

On paper it should have been hard to beat. It had a state telco's balance sheet and a partner that had invented the online marketplace, sitting behind a national brand nobody needed introducing to. What it was going up against was Tokopedia and Bukalapak, then Shopee and Lazada, all of them burning investor money on free shipping and none of them answerable to a listed utility's quarterly reporting.

The distance here is not really regional. Every country has this company, and the reason I have nothing personal to say about Blanja is the same reason most Indonesians had nothing to say about it: there was never a moment when it was the obvious place to go. A marketplace has exactly one thing to sell, which is that the sellers are already there. Money cannot buy that and neither can a phone company's logo.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the numbers Telkom published ~

In 2018 Blanja reported 3.2 million registered users, which sounds like a business. Telkom's own annual report for 2019 gives the figure that matters next to it: about 62,900 monthly active users. Roughly one account in fifty was opening the site in a given month, and gross merchandise value for the year came to Rp188.3 billion, a number a single mid-sized competitor could do in a quiet week.

What makes that pair unusual is that it was disclosed at all. Private marketplaces publish registrations and go quiet about usage, because registrations only ever go up. A state-controlled listed company has to file, so the gap between the number the marketing used and the number the business ran on ended up in a public document. It is the cleanest picture of a dying marketplace this inventory has.

~ thirty days to collect your money ~

The closing notice said that from 1 September 2020 all purchasing on Blanja would stop, though orders already moving could finish normally. Anyone holding a balance in the Blanja Wallet had until 30 September to take it out.

That last line is the only point where a dead marketplace touches a real person. A stored balance is not a favor the platform is doing you, it is a liability sitting on its books, and a withdrawal deadline is the company closing those books rather than looking after you. Whatever was not claimed by the end of September stopped being anyone's problem. I have never had money stranded in a product that was shutting down, and the only reason is luck, because everybody who uses these things is one announcement away from it.

~ the boom it missed ~

Fajrin Rasyid, Telkom's director of digital business, framed the closure as focus. From 1 October 2020 the group would concentrate its e-commerce work on corporate and small business customers, selling to companies instead of to households. Which is a defensible strategy and also an admission, since B2B is where telcos go when the consumer product has not worked.

The timing is the part worth sitting with. September 2020 was the middle of the largest expansion Indonesian online retail has ever had, with a locked-down population buying everything through a phone and every competitor posting numbers they would never see again. Blanja shut down into that. A market growing that fast will carry almost any business that has customers, and it could not carry this one.

~ where the address went ~

The domain now lands on Uzone.id, a technology news site with no connection to any of it. The portal that gave up its address in 2014 outlived the marketplace that took it by nothing at all, since both of them ended up pointed at somebody else's homepage in the end.

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