Digital Mall of Asia (DMA), a first-of-its-kind virtual e-commerce platform designed to offer immersive shopping experiences to consumers, has raised Rs 22 crore in a fresh funding round. The investment was made by Satish Jain through Amour Infrastructure. Jain is one of the most prolific investors in the Indian real estate who recently decided to go the e-commerce way and invest in DMA as an angel investor.
Through this major funding, DMA aims to scale up product development and branding initiatives, thus creating large-scale awareness about its key offerings followed by an upcoming launch in the Indian e-commerce space.
DMA, which is a unique concept coined by the founders of Yokeasia Malls, is set to go live in January 2020. It is a perfect mix of ‘digital malls’ and ‘digital shops’ that aims to offer a virtual mall environment to consumers while providing a safe investment and selling platform to retailers and vendors across India.
To operate on DMA, vendors, and retailers will be required to rent a shop in their desired city, tower, and floor. In doing so, not only will they be enabled to integrate their offline stores to a virtual mall environment but also be given exclusive rights to sell a particular product category or brand in their respective city. This will help eliminate artificial hyper-competitiveness, which has remained a common concern for retailers in most e-commerce portals.
The new-age virtual mall will run on a zero-commission model, which means retailers will only be required to pay a fixed monthly rent of as low as Rs 10,000 as compared to other e-commerce portals that also charge a commission of 5-35 percent in addition to rent.
Since retailers will not be paying any extra commission, it will enable them to sell products at the cheapest price points possible and thus improve profitability while making the entire shopping journey even more affordable and welcoming for end customers. Another relief that the unique model will bring to shoppers is the elimination of product counterfeiting since they will be allowed to check the product thoroughly and make the final payment, only when fully satisfied.
Rishabh Mehra, Managing Director, and CEO, Digital Mall of Asia said, “We are extremely delighted to bring on-board an industry veteran like Satish Jain as our strategic investment partner. With his domain expertise and valuable insights, we are confident to unlock the potential of DMA in the Indian e-commerce space and offer seamless shopping experiences to consumers PAN-India. DMA is a one-of-its-kind concept and we are certain that nobody has experienced such innovation in the country to date. We are very excited to launch this unique portal for the first time ever in the Indian market and hope to witness amazing responses from the crowd, especially the millennial generation.”
The advent of DMA is anticipated to bring an astronomical transformation to the Indian e-commerce space. It will change the selling and shopping experiences of retailers and consumers, respectively – forever. Most essentially, the platform will give back the control of data in the hands of shoppers and ensure convenience and safety to retailers and vendors through its visually-rich, virtual and experiential offering backed by tech advances such as artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR).
