How Anchanto Facilitates E-commerce Management for Enterprises across APAC

Guest post by Vaibhav Dabhade, CEO and founder, Anchanto

The fragmented nature of the e-commerce landscape and consumers’ behavioral differences across countries makes Asia Pacific a challenging market for every actor. Whether they are brands, retailers, small businesses, distributors, or third party logistics systems (3PLs), e-commerce enablers or services providers, understanding the dynamics, identifying the right opportunities, and equipping itself with the right technologies are the keys to success for any e-commerce company in the region.

The challenges and opportunities APAC holds for online businesses

Every country is unique

It is important to understand the diversity of the APAC region that comprises multiple countries having distinct languages, cultures, customer expectations, with each one being completely different from other. What works for a Singaporean market may not work for an Indonesian one. This variation across markets reinforces the need for enterprises to gather rich and accurate operations and sales data to make better informed decisions.

APAC consumers tend to ‘browse-and-buy’

With almost 98% of online shoppers in Asia having made a purchase on aggregator marketplaces instead of individual stores, the ‘browse-and-buy’ model of marketplaces is clearly more popular than the ‘search-and-buy’ model. Broader catalogues and better prices were some of the major reasons consumers leaned towards marketplaces rather than individual stores. This requires businesses to be present on multiple marketplaces to reach customers, leading to multiple sales channel management complexities.

APAC has untapped economies of scale

Because of APAC’s economic, infrastructural, and geographical diversity, e-commerce is developing and is still far from being as mature as it could be. Due to varying levels of economic development across different countries, different regulatory regimes, deep rooted religious heritages, cultural differences, disparity in growth rates, complex infrastructure and distribution systems, enterprises still have much room to understand the local market nuances to fuel their growth, unlike their more well-established global counterparts.

Bypassing complexities with e-commerce management system

E-commerce businesses across APAC need to take a unified approach to tackle these regional complexities and challenges. They need a technology system that can integrate readily with multiple ecosystem players like marketplaces, web stores, last-mile carriers, fulfillment payers, accounting tools, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) companies at once while helping to increase productivity and simplify their multi-channel/omni-channel e-commerce sales & logistics operations through automated management. This is where Anchanto comes in.

Global brands work with Anchanto to increase efficiency

Anchanto helps global businesses such as Nestle, Fossil, L’Oreal, HP, Telkom Indonesia, and Great Deals eCommerce Corp. manage highly successful e-commerce backend and logistics operations through its robust and scalable SaaS software. The company developed its technology by gaining practical experience after running e-commerce fulfillment operations for multiple brands — Garnier, L’Oreal, and Maybelline, to name a few — in Singapore for 2 years. Today, 8000+ businesses across APAC run seamless end-to-end e-commerce operations through Anchanto platforms. Having walked in the shoes of customers quite literally, the Anchanto team has developed systems that transform the way global enterprises handle their e-commerce operations. The first software, SelluSeller, is a powerful multi-channel e-commerce management platform that enables businesses to manage their backend operations on a centralized dashboard. The other software, Wareo, is a full-suite warehouse management system built with 3PLs, warehousing players, brands and e-distributors in mind. Wareo helps businesses manage B2B (retail and bulk logistics) & B2C (e-commerce) processes through a single system and transform their existing warehouses into seamless fulfillment centers.

Local presence has helped Anchanto tailor solutions to support brands

Anchanto’s technological platforms have been built and upgraded after gathering insights through business operations for 9 years. Thanks to Anchanto’s local presence across core markets such as Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, India, South Korea and Australia, the systems have been developed after considering consumer behaviors and local nuances of each market. Given that businesses are able to manage all their marketplaces on one platform, they gain a clear edge over competitors by reaching maximum shoppers. The systems are equipped with local 100+ e-commerce ecosystem integrations that enable businesses to bypass complexities in the region. Lastly, Anchanto’s agility and flexibility allows enterprises to get customizations and integrations when necessary.

Making Anchanto platforms safe, secure, and seamless with AWS

Anchanto’s SaaS technology has been built keepings afety and privacy requirements of the customers in mind. Anchanto ensures complete alignment with quality and safety standards for the development of its platforms. This is where Anchanto’s partnership with Amazon plays a crucial role; the Anchanto platforms are hosted 100% on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

For instance, on 2019’s Singles Day (11/11), Anchanto’s customers processed 1.1 million orders worth a GMV of USD $44 million, with 400+ API calls per second, all with 100% uptime. So, by ensuring a seamless, safe, and secure software infrastructure that is highly scalable, Anchanto can enable world-class e-commerce management for its customers.

Anchanto Co-Founder and COO, Abhimanyu Kashikar, says, “Our collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the key components of our offerings. AWS not only helps us deploy our scalable infrastructure on its servers but also advises us on how we can save on costs, enabling us to pass these savings on to our customers. The AWS team also helps us audit our deployment regularly & shares suggestions so that we continue to adopt new technological enhancements brought in by AWS to boost performances and ensure the highest security for our systems.

AWS is very supportive when it comes to optimizing and utilizing the technology provided by them to the fullest. We are currently working closely with AWS and partners on a few exciting projects that will result in the addition of some amazing features in our SaaS systems to help businesses further save time, efforts and costs.”

Conclusion

Anchanto’s locally developed technology, tried-and-tested local integrations, agility and flexibility, coupled with Amazon’s infrastructure, are helping enterprises across APAC help bypass regional complexities & challenges and achieve desired growth in the region.