MatahariMall

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

~ the obituary ~

i knew the phrase the alibaba of indonesia before i knew which company was chasing it. for a stretch in the mid-2010s every big market in asia had one, some local giant pouring money into being the amazon or the alibaba of its own country. indonesia's version, or one of them, was MatahariMall, and it reached me the way the others did, as a strategy story in the tech press rather than a shop i ever opened. i have never bought anything in rupiah in my life.

this is read off the record from the outside. MatahariMall launched in 2015, built by the Lippo Group, one of indonesia's largest conglomerates, which put a reported half a billion dollars behind it. the goal was stated plainly, to be the alibaba of indonesia, a single marketplace selling everything from clothes to electronics, aimed at the fastest-growing internet population in southeast asia. half a billion dollars is the kind of money that is supposed to settle a market.

the money was real but so was the competition. Lazada had Alibaba's backing and Tokopedia had SoftBank's. both were spending on free shipping and discounts at a pace that treated losses as the plan. MatahariMall could not out-burn them, and it never climbed to the top of the market its funding had assumed. Lippo also had something the pure players did not, a giant chain of physical department stores, and slowly that became the more useful asset.

so the everything-store dream got quietly downsized. in late 2018 Lippo decided MatahariMall would stop being a standalone marketplace and merge into Matahari.com, the online front of Matahari Department Store, its own brick-and-mortar chain. the sprawling catalog narrowed to mostly fashion, the thing the department store already sold. MatahariMall.com stopped taking orders on the 20th of november 2018. the alibaba of indonesia became the website of a clothing shop.

~ the case file ~

~ the ambition ~

i find the ambition more interesting than the failure. 'the alibaba of indonesia' was not a crazy thing to want in 2015. indonesia had a huge young population getting online fast, and a shopping market that was clearly about to move onto the phone. Lippo had the money and the retail history to make a real run at it. what it did not have was a patient foreign giant behind it, willing to lose money for a decade on purpose, which turned out to be the one thing that actually decided who won.

~ what it became ~

the ending is gentler than most graves here, and a little sadder for it. MatahariMall did not crash, it got absorbed by its own parent's older business. the tech it built went into Matahari.com and the brand name went away, folded back into a department store that had existed long before the internet did. it is the rare case of a flashy e-commerce startup being quietly inherited by the boring retailer that owned it all along. the half-billion-dollar bet did not vanish. it just ended up modernizing a chain of shops instead of conquering a country.

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