Social commerce, the idea of buying products listed on social media sites is growing tremendously in Asia. The growth and market are expanding so rapidly that even the tech giant, Facebook was eager to enter into this space with payments trials in Southeast Asia. From a user’s perspective, all these famous social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook or even Pinterest are platforms where users can discover the latest trends or ideas of fashion inspiration. But when it comes to buying or checking out, they might not be able to give users the convenience they are looking for.
And this is exactly where Goxip fits in. Within Goxip, users are presented with an Instagram-style feed to find inspiration for fashion along with their image search ability to find a range of similar and ready to be purchased items by uploading just a photo of the fashion piece they are look for. Once the photo is uploaded, the picture can be cropped and filtered through a recognition software that automatically suggests similarly styled clothes for the user.
So, rather than spending a long time in a typical ecommerce store searching for ‘red, luxury, dress’ to find that dress you saw from magazine, a photo is all you need now to find something similar out of Goxip’s 2 million international shipping products (and possibly more affordable).
Last year, the startup participated at a pitch competition in her hometown, Hong Kong at the Rise conference in August. They were able to go through all the stages and eventually became the winner of the RISE Breakthrough competition and brought home US$120,000 worth of IBM cloud credits. Just months after the contest, the company was able to close one of the biggest seed fundings in Asia — $1.62 million. The financing was led by an interesting source — the daughter of Malaysian billionaire Vincent Tan, Chairman of Berjaya Group — with participation from existing early investor Ardent Capital.
With their Android and iOS apps finally out in the market, Goxip is set to make the app viral in Hong Kong and Malaysia first – the two immediate target market which the team is focusing on first. Given the rapidly growing mobile penetration rate in South East Asia, it would be interesting to see how Goxip will leverage their resources and make a mark against other big players such as Facebook and Alibaba. With its unique image recognition angle, Goxip can really make a difference in acquiring the large number of mobile users in the South East Asia region as their loyal users. Goxip is now available for iOS and Android.
