As promised before here is a sneak peak at TMX. Its for internal dev right now – so there is no branding or sexiness to the look now – but all the glory is under the hood.
What we have here is infrastructure to capture massive amounts of products, nearly automatically, on a grand scale. One we capture it we have a large number of channels to take those products to western markets.
So, if you where looking in China for some product, you would see it like this:
Not exactly easily sellable to western markets. But the price is smoking good.
So, TMX comes in and gives us a workflow, that will enable us to outsource the various steps of the ‘westerning’ this product for sale – to anywhere we want – in our office, in India, anywhere.
And here is how internally this looks:
From here, we go anywhere – B2B, B2C, Amazon, UK, US, DE, Japan, etc.
And the beauty is – no inventory to hold.
What’s more – we are going to enable the system for ANYONE to pick products and add them to our database – suppliers, students, etc. Once added, the various players that are selecting products, will get paid in points – which will be convertible to cash – based on how well they pick products, and how well they sell in west. Of course, we will be guiding people into the various categories we want to fill – and do QA on all the details –but in essence, every person that knows TaoBao in China, will be able to become our merchandiser, and get paid for it (if they are good).
So, not to sound passe, but we are talking about going social – enabling people that love shopping to create their own virtual collections, integrate them with others collections and then see how they do. I am personally not so ‘social’ enamored – but I do believe in the wisdom of the masses – and given so many people available in China – what better than to give people an opportunity to virtually shop on line, have fun doing it, and make money if they are good at it.
And by this, I don’t need to have 20 or 100 merchandisers, but rather one or two QA (with some SOP’s). So, once we get going, I think its going to go crazy how fast we are getting products in at a crazy fast pace.
This will be probably the last time I will show screen caps of TMX, since as we go on, we are going to frame in more details that have taken years to conceptually develop, and would rather keep those under the hood for a while. 