Mediacorp’s new eBay wannabe, Mocca, doesn’t seem to impress me. For many of us who have been buying and selling online a lot within Singapore, we know that the best places to buy goods sold by others are not the generic portals like eBay, Yahoo, and definitely not Mocca–but the niche sites such as:
HardwareZone (for technology)
CozyCot (for girly stuff)
Togoparts (for cycling)
SGSpree (for bluk buying, mostly girls clothes)
Why is that? Community. Large portals without a niche following tend not to have a real community you can identify with and depend on. Sellers are just there to reach the masses and not participate in the community.
Filed under: Singapore
Gotta find more ways to leverage on their brand name – want to get a slice of the online marketing dollars…
Their sales script could be like this: “Now that you’ve paid $xxxx on ad placement on [put mediacorp website here - eg. Channel 5], add $5000 more and advertise on Mocca! Good bargain – can’t get this kind of price with [put competitor - eg. ST Online]!”
Yea, I’ve noticed that you can never get a good deal in Singapore! Either the sellers put a reserve price or they set the minimum bid way too high! Kiasu!!!
Well, I hate to say this but in Singapore, mainstream media still rules for the majority of the population.
Look at the success of STOMP and how it has penetrated the psyche of the population. Initially, it met with a lot of scepticism including from yours truly as its positioning seem to be unclear. However, it has the distinct advantage of a huge media company behind it.
My own thinking is that MediaCorp is trying to capitalise on its significant reach with its web properties (especially Channel News ASia) to see it can muscle into some of that action. That plus their existing fingers in many different media pies, especially TV and radio plus a pretty strong newspaper product. MediaCorp is probably able to drive considerable traffic to its online portal.
Honestly, I haven’t heard of those niche portals which you have just highlighted except for Hardwarezone (which is already bought by SPH). I seriously doubt that the majority of the population do too.
Certainly, there is room for niche marketing channels and I am encouraged by these brave independent efforts. However, we should never underestimate the power of the media juggernauts.
i guess mediacorp is too eager to get a slice of the online cake. tat mobtv is a good eg.
Cool Insider: Guess those sites are niche for a reason – you have to belong to that community / social group (eg. young lady, mum-to-be or biker)… which i doubt you are.
Vertical markets sites are easier to build and market to.
Like Walter, I haven’t heard of those niche portals highlighted except for Hardwarezone (HWZ).
On the other hand, I’ve sold some stuff on Yahoo! quite quickly. Had a lousy user experience on eBay and stopped selling there totally. Can’t say much about Mocca though. They are offering free ads right now. But the user interface is terrible as far as I’m concerned. I don’t understand why a simple image upload has to launch some certificate and a java applet which froze my browser “forever” until I “kill” the process. :-p
As for STOMP, I’ve never got to the second or third page on that portal. The main page is so cluttered that it’s such a turnoff! Now, I fear for HWZ.
When even Borders closed down their online store and tied down with Amazon.com, it makes one wonder why they are doing this!
Of course, reinventing the wheel is one of Singapore’s forte.
They reinvented the wheel with ItchyLink too when they could have just bought Octopus wholesale from HK. And now we are paying $3 per card because it’s too expensive to make those cards. Right.
STOMP a big success? The jury’s still out. Like so many other local media ventures, I expect MOCCA to crash on its face.
Perhaps they have some spare cash to throw away?
Wondering how much they paid for the domain.
It’s likely to be a platform for Mediacorp to cross-sell and up-sell the rest of their properties.
Well since it is still free service, it will not harm us to try the service
let them do what they want, they have the money, but i think i will not use the service if they start ask for payment, there is always a way to sell your stuff online without need to pay to advertise.
Let’s not forget that being a listed company, they have to sell a “growth” story to shareholders. The reality of whether it’ll work or not, can be dealt with later – same thing as what happened to Creative and their big bet on MP3 players.
I myself have not heard of any of those sites mentioned too except HWZ.
The sites listed are just a few examples of niche communities. Sure if you don’t belong to them, you probably won’t know them. But my point is not about the specific sites but the lessons learned. Craigslist for examples is killing classifieds revenues in the US newspapers, so these niche communities are doing the same to the likes of eBay, Yahoo, and will likely do the same to Mocca. Surely it is easy to keep a site up, but let’s take a look at the size of the community in the months to come. I believe Singaporeans are more savvy than simply falling for a well publicized Mocca.
Well, at first I was quite impressed and thought it was for “cars” since they have a whole suite of Ads on mainstream TV.
But ever since, I dunno what they stand for other than a general classifieds.
“‘MOCCA’ stands for MediaCorp Online Communities and Classified Advertising.” quoted from their site
SGSpree (for bluk buying, mostly girls clothes)
Just wanted to point out it should be “bulk”.
Mocca does online advertisements, why are you comparing to an auction site like Ebay?
Anyway, I’m putting on my money on Mocca to succeed, simply because Goliath is behind it.
This is amazing. There are actually serious opposing views on Mocca here. I’m not saying Mocca will crash and die, there’s big money and a lot of “face” behind this. But will it build a community like HWZ or CozyCot did?
It is not easy for mocca to succeed, if they current model is to charge advertisers. Advertisers are the content provider, they should be free to publish what they want to sell. There will be eyeball once there is content. Once they is eyeball, do content related sponsored ad like google or yahoo. It all voice down to business model.
They are currently sustaining themself thru their own marketing effort, but this is not the way to go. But they are on the right track to digitize content(MOBTV) as it is the way to go. I think MC want to do something, but just lack expertise in this area. Then again we all learn and from our mistakes, if we see them as mistakes.
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I think most people here do not know the whole story, and are looking at things from a very narrow angle. Mocca’s pitch is amazing, but of course the general public will only see it slowly in the longer term. It will never be eBay or Amazon, but what it will eventually do for the Singaporean community will definitely be something we will applaud. Go mocca go!!
You’re comparing Mocca to eBay?
Are you a moron? eBay is an auction site.