More than two years after the government launched the idea of a Maltese e-shopping mall for local merchants, TrolleyMania.com was inaugurated to the delight of the promoters who did not expect such a take-up by Maltese online users in the first days of operations.
The idea behind TrolleyMania.com is to provide an e-mall for local merchants, especially the smaller retailers, to sell their products and services online without going into too much technical and financial trouble.
Local web-development company Alert Communications won the public tendering process to set-up the e-mall under the supervision and promotion of the Malta Information Technology Agency. Alert Communications is in charge of developing, administering and running the e-mall, including all the related costs.
“We expected people to be interested but frankly we did not expect a tsunami of traffic,” an elated Claudine Cassar, managing director of Alert Communications, told i-Tech. “On the first day of the e-mall we were overwhelmed by the response. So many people were hitting the site concurrently that it acted in the same manner as a denial of service attack. So we took the decision to take the bull by the horns, take the site offline and upgrade the infrastructure to a level that could cope with the traffic.”
The first week of the portal saw over 10,000 unique visitors, viewing an average of 38 pages in each visit. A good percentage of visitors returned more than once. The top sellers from the 50 shops in the e-mall are household appliances such as kitchen scales, desk lamps and food mixers, then books, beauty products and silver items.
The latest official figures show that over 70 per cent of Maltese internet users shop online but most of the shopping is done from foreign sites.
“Millions of euros are leaving the Maltese economy because Maltese consumers who want to shop from the convenience of their own homes do not find the products they require from local e-stores. Trolley Mania.com has been launched to make it easy for local retailers to set up their own e-shop at minimal cost, thus increasing the range of products available to Maltese online shoppers.
“Overseas online shops such as Amazon and eBay are a threat to local shops. The only way to counter them is to sell online in order to offer the same convenience to clients. Furthermore, it makes it possible for the shops to reach a wider clientele, including overseas clients,” explained Ms Cassar.
TrolleyMania.com makes it easier for Maltese shops to start selling online as it takes care of the technical aspect of setting-up the online shop for a one-time initial fee of just €250 + VAT and an annual charge of €232 + VAT. It is also working closely with Maltapost so that products are collected from the merchant’s store and delivered to the customer within 24 hours. The system also calculates international shipping costs automatically.
The e-mall boasts it can set a merchant up in a few easy steps.
“A merchant can have a store set up within half an hour,” insists Ms Cassar. “The only time consuming process is the merchant account application, since the bank takes a few days to process that and issue the account. However, we have had several shops which applied for the account but in the meantime published their store accepting cash on delivery payment.”
A promotional campaign is already under way to attract both new buyers and sellers.
“We are delighted because we have managed to attract a wide spectrum of participants like artists, people who have a product to sell but do not have a bricks and mortar shop, small local bazaars, not-for-profit entities, and large retailers. It is clear the TrolleyMania.com has filled a need in the market,” concluded Ms Cassar.