indi.ca

So fun it’ll dislocate your thumbs.

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Dialog has recently re-launched wow.lk, formerly a Suntel portal, as a sort of e-commerce aggregator. I’m sure it was a Herculean effort to integrate iBuy, anything.lk, Tradenet, etc, but it all sorta comes together. Into something I don’t want to use, admittedly, but something which I’m sure has some appeal.

Why don’t I want to use it? Honestly, because the girl giving two disjointed thumbs up disturbs me. But those quibbles aside, it is a good collection of stuff, although ikman.lk has already outpaced them in terms of classifieds.

Wow is, however, a good move by Dialog to aggregate it’s sometimes divergent properties into one, tied together by the muscle of the new anything.lk acquisition. In this way they’re using the more stable part of Anything’s business – the ecommerce part (which is like 30% of their top-line, almost equal with coupons at 40%). This factoid is from Echelon magazine, which has others.

Wow has traffic dating from the ancient era and I presume their classifieds and stuff are preserved. The broader question is how much is ecommerce in Sri Lanka worth. Presumably a lot, but there are a lot of people selling electronics and stuff online. While this Dialog/Anything collabo would presumably hurt them through size, if Amazon (or the Indian clone FlipKart) decides to come here that could all change.

Me, personally, I just don’t buy that much stuff and electronics I prefer to get friends/family to carry from abroad. There’s obviously a market for ecommerce, but I still don’t see anyone taking the mass shot like Amazon nor is anyone really niching it in an interesting way.

A few exceptions (niche wise) are TrendRally (a clothing shop that I saw in an LT ad) and The Bludge, both doing clothing. Besides that there’s a lot of somewhat generic entries of different sizes essentially replicating the airport duty free stores. Which is good business, just not that cool.