Kemana.com has been building buzz since early this year and on the website they counting down to May 2010 as their launching date. By the end of May, they changed the frontpage and now they claiming April 2010 as their launching date. After June 2010, they’re still not launching anything so i lost interest, until today when i randomly visit their website and there they are, launched.
Kemana.com was founded by Chris Benz (pictured left), an entrepreneur from New York who also founded CraftNetwork.com back in 2005. The reason they operate Kemana.com in Indonesia? I have no idea, but whatever it is it’s not because there’s no competition here. We have plenty of competition in the e-commerce/marketplace area, actually we have too many of them, but then again there’s no such thing as having too many competition.
Again, i don’t see anything special from Kemana.com compared to their competitors such as Plasa.com, Tokopedia.com, Krazymarket.com and any other small players. The one features from Kemana.com that other player doesn’t have is phone-based confirmation where buyers can take a picture of themselves with the item he’s buying to confirm that the item has arrived from the seller to buyer. But really, who wants to do that?
I guess most people will likely use the digital signature feature provided by their shipping partner, RPX.
Kemana.com is legally an American company run from New York, where the management staff are based. But they also have an operational office in Bali which is a good place for having a holiday but not a good place to run a company. Seriously.
Btw, how exactly the management people actually manage stuff from New York? Can they  understand the culture and behavior of Indonesian internet user from there?
I'm really interested to hear the response from Kemana.com to this article đŸ™‚
All of this long wait just to see them using Magento? Disappointed already despite of their fancy looking site
I sincerely hope so, but kinda doubt it.
maybe they're just focusing on the sales/marketing rather than the site's infrastructure.
i just places and received my first order with kemana.com. quick transaction, especially delivery. it only take 2 days to process. and i'm very impressed. fyi, they currently have three payment methods (cc, bank transfer, and paypal) … choose what you like đŸ˜‰
Many of your facts were incorrect for this article.
Chris Benz is based in Sanur and Denpasar, Bali, and has business colleagues in Jakarta and NY.
The IT management is handled in NY, as are some of the business and legal issues.
I've done business with Craft Network before, so I know Chris Benz.
I think you may have been focusing on some of the supply and technical issues when evaluating the site.
I haven't used the site to order, but just browsing though it it's clearly far superior to the others in terms of GUI and user experience. As for the delivery mechanisms, I'm not sure.
I'll be trying it soon though, as its inventory increases.
Yes, i know that Chris Benz is based in Jakarta and have been doing business in Indonesia since Craft Network, i never stated otherwise. My sources told me that the whole management team is based in NY, the operational team (sales & marketing etc) based in Bali.
Thanks for the comment though.
No, as far as I know, they're not using Magento. They're using Kohana PHP Framework.