PlayHawaii Ditches Daily Deals, Goes After Customer Loyalty as Perx

Several days ago, we wrote about the acquisition of PlayHawaii by CorwdSavings and subsequently its subsidiary, Maiplay, in Indonesia and Singapore. Maiplay was a daily deals/group buying sites focusing on high class merchants and customers. Now the founders have a “new game”, a customer loyalty service called Perx.

I spoke to John Sugihara and Andrew Roth, the co-founders of Maiplay, about their experience in the daily deals space in Indonesia. Lately the market for daily deals and group buying services in Indonesia seem to be saturated and even Groupon is having difficulties in improving the sales and loyalty of its customers.

“Merchants want two things: new customers and a method to record repeat customers. Most group buying sites has no such ability to offer to merchants,” says Andrew Roth over email. This became the reason for them to focus on customer loyalty program with their new service, Perx.

The idea is to provide promotional offers after a customer completes several transactions at the normal price, a reverse of what group buying model does, which offers crazy deals for first time customers with the hope that they will return (even though not very many do). This customer loyalty concept is certainly not new, usually merchants hand out stamps or points to customers for evey transaction and they will receive benefits according to the number of stamps or points they have acquired.

They believe that this concept is the future of e-commerce and group buying, that is taking the stamps and points concept to the digital world, which can be stored on smartphones. Right now Per is only available as an iOS app but they will soon release an Android app. Even though Perx is based in Singapore, Sugihara and Roth said that Indonesia is a trmendous market and they will be in the country soon enough.