A screen shot of Daily Mart’s home page. WWW.DAILYMART.COM.MM
Good business is all about good timing, and Daily Mart, Myanmar’s first online supermarket, could not have arrived at a more opportune moment.
Launched in January, the company stepped into an uncrowded, if untested, e-commerce sector just as internet penetration in Yangon reached new heights.
Telecommunications firms Ooredoo, Telenor, and dominant state-backed Myanmar Posts and Telecommunications, or MPT, are scrambling for subscribers by offering cheap data packages and sim cards that cost little more than $1. Daily Mart also may have thought about tapping into the growing foreign business community and expat scene.
But whether its the competition from local shops and markets, the traffic in the city that slows delivery times, the slightly higher prices at Daily Mart, or the reluctance to try out something so new, buyers are few and far between, the Myanmar Times reported on Thursday.
Daily Mart, which delivers to 24 townships in Yangon 7 days a week, between 9am and 5pm and 7pm to 10pm (with a charge of up to $2 if the total is not over $10), is getting between three and four orders a day and around 48 daily site visits on average, the Times reported. The orders are made online through a virtual shopping cart, retrieved from warehouses and delivered to homes, where payments are made in cash.
“I think we are still a bit early to enter the market, but we are already here, so we just move on,” co-founder and operations director Ma Zin Mar Lwin told the paper. “We will try to get more people to know this kind of service and how convenient it can become in their daily lives.”
Co-founder and executive director Ko Htut Thant Syn said a minimum of 20 orders per day would be ideal.
