While governments and private sectors across the world are engaged in a battle to curb the novel coronavirus, some use this epidemic as an opportunity for profiteering. Complaints of unjust and exorbitant pricing of products on e-commerce platforms have prompted market regulators to crack the whip on several e-commerce companies.
In Southeast Asia, many marketplaces, such as Tokopedia (Indonesia), Lazada (Thailand), Sendo, Tiki, and Shopee Vietnam were pulled up by regulators for exploitation during the epidemic.
While companies like Tokopedia took swift action by closing thousands of online stores that were selling personal protective equipment at exorbitant prices on its marketplace, some others imposed fines on sellers.
There are some others, who have leveraged new-age technologies to address this issue. Tiki is one such company, which came up with several novel products to mitigate the price hike on its marketplace.
Also Read: How Vietnam’s e-commerce firm Tiki is tiding over COVID-19 crisis
The Vietnamese e-commerce giant has introduced Artificial Intelligence-based features and strict audit to provide customers with the best products in terms of quality and prices, as well as preventing hoarding.
“Online shopping is one of the safest and most-convenient solutions to meet the daily shopping needs of consumers, who are under the lockdown. However, consumers are worried about the price hike on some marketplaces, as well as the poor quality of the products,” Tiki CTO Tridiv Vasavada said. “As a technology company, we have fully exploited and applied technologies to control the quality and price of the products, as well as to mitigate hoarding.”
‘Winner system’ and ‘buy box’
The company has introduced two new features on its marketplace — ‘winner system’ and ‘buy box’ — to provide the best possible offers to its customers.
Tiki CTO Tridiv Vasavada
What it does is that when an item is offered by multiple sellers on the platform, Tiki puts a score on every offer by using “Regression AI”-based mathematical models. The tool takes into account various factors, such as price competitiveness, delivery speed, return and cancellation trends of the seller, and the proximity of the stock to the location of the customer. The offer that scores the highest — whether it is from Tiki’s own seller (Tiki Trading) or a third-party seller — is presented as the primary offer to the customer.
Tiki Trading proactively attempts to secure as much inventory as possible for such stock-keeping units (SKUs) and places the inventory near the high-demand clusters, ensuring the stability of product prices.
“Technology is used to price the offers by comparing prices from a diverse set of marketplaces. This system is currently applied to approximately 300 SKUs and we will extend this to 50,000 more soon,” revealed Vasavada.
Now, to detect and remove poor quality products, Tiki has developed an AI-based Investigation Tool, which collects and processes a huge volume of data, including customer review, rating, return and cancellation rates.
It has also built a prediction model to detect fraud and automatically turn off/remove fail-to-meet-standard products.
This technology helps reduce 6x processing time with an accuracy rate of 90 per cent, according to Vasavada.
Lastly, to avoid the hoarding of products, Tiki’s system has set a certain limit to the number of products on each SKU a customer can purchase.
“Some users may circumvent this limitation by creating multiple accounts to place one order every minute. To tackle this, we have built a fraud detection system (FDS), which uses a variety of encoded customer data, from demographics to shopping behaviours, and applies AI models to predict within a couple of seconds, whether or not a customer is fraudulent,” he continued.
This system is applied to each and every order placed on Tiki and able to be scaled up to thousands of orders in event of rapid demand rush on particular SKUs such as medical products.
Vasavada hopes that a combination of smart pricing, optimised inventory placement and fraud prevention will offer daily necessities and medical supplies to as many customers as we can at fair prices from reliable sellers.
Besides technologies, audit activities on Tiki are continuously implemented to ensure the quality of products and sellers.
“During our audit process, sellers are required to provide their business licenses or household business certificates to fulfil the seller registration on Tiki. Besides, sellers are requested to prove product origins and authenticity through eligible certificates before products are onboard.
Tiki also keeps tracking customers’ feedback to remove violation products and sellers. The strictest penalty is the permanent removal of violation stores on Tiki,” he concluded.
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Image Credit: Tiki
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