Antsquare

e-commerce

limited liability company

Canada/USA

https://www.antsquare.com/

highly user friendly, high quality and unique products, lower mark-up than competitors and built in audience.

Daniel Ling

Guyllian De Beule

Daniel Ling and Dexter Hu

Summary

Antsquare is an e-commerce platform that reshapes the way local products are being bought and sold online. It connects buyer and seller by the usage of an app in which they can communicate directly with eachother, where an online map shows what’s available in a given area, where you can make a purchase through the app and schedule a pickup time based on the seller’s availability.

Antsquare is solely being used to sell new products. Antsquare distinguishes itself based on:

•             a highly user friendly interface;

•             high quality and unique products;

•             lower mark-up rates than the competition;

•             a built in audience.

The name antsquare has a powerful meaning, it represents the people in the world as being “ants”, bringing them together on a sort of market place, a “square”.

Background

The company was founded in 2014 by Daniel Ling and Dexter Hu and has known a rapid growth since then. Daniel and Dexter discovered that there wasn’t a general online marketplace for local products and that the way they were being sold was very complicated, impersonal and inconsistent. Therefore, the two entrepreneurs launched Antsquare to fulfil this need.

Mission

Creating an online platform to buy and sell local, high quality products.

Vision

Reshape the way local products are being bought and sold by bringing back the human element in online shopping.

Values

Passion, integrity and inclusion.

Business Model

The business model of Antsquare differs the company form it’s competitors in a huge way and was developed into a big competitive advantage to acquire new clients. To sketch the business model of Antsquare, the whole client acquisition process should be explained. First of all, a client starts by setting up a virtual store via the application on there phone by registering an account.

They can adapt their virtual store to their corporate identity and add photos, videos and text. Once the client has gone through this step, they can start to do business with potential buyers. These buyers also have to register on the platform, by doing this, they’ll have full access to all the features that Antsquare offers.

Both buyer and seller can use the application without any payment. The part where it gets interesting is when a client pays the virtual store via credit card, then antsquare charges a fee of 7% on the total amount of the sold goods. You read it correctly, the genius part in the business model of Antsquare is that they only make money when business is done by paying with credit card, when a client pays cash, nothing is charged to the client of Antsquare.

The client (virtual store) has no financial risk whatsoever, nor has the customer. The client only has to cede a part of his earnings when payment is done via credit card. This is a huge competitive advantage for Antsquare which helped them to expand at an enormous rate over the last year.

Growth

Antsquare has known a rapid growth since their launch in 2014, they exceeded the amount of 20 000 users in less than two years. This outstanding performance is mainly due to the innovative business model according to Daniel Ling.

They are not planning to stop there, at the moment, the company has three physical offices in Vancouver (Canada), Seattle (Canada) and Silicon Valley (USA). The goal for the future expansion of the company is to open two new offices in 2017; one in New York City and one in Chicago which will automatically lead to new active users.

Customers

In theory, every single local store on a global scale is a potential  customer of Antsquare. But the current client acquisition strategy consists out of direct sales. More specifically, Antsquare works with independent sales people to convince local stores in a specific area. This means that to obtain new customers, Antsquare needs local salesmen in a specific area, which only allows them to acquire new customers in the region where they have physical offices (Vancouver, Seattle and Silicon Valley).

Competitors

The two biggest competitors that Anstquare has to cope with on an international scale are Ebay and Amazon. On top of this, almost every single country or region has its own online peer to peer e-commerce platform; think about Kapaza and 2dehands in Belgium.

Although Anstsquare differs itself extremely good by focusing on new and high quality local products, the competition stays very though. Daniel says that he doesn’t need to be extremely worried about the competition due to the fact that they are all indirect competitors; “not a single competitor offers that high quality and specific service as we do”.

Conclusion

Antsquare’s business model has beared fruit in terms of expansion of the company in a short time. In the future, CEO Daniel Ling will do everything to maintain the same rate of expansion. Specifically, he’ll keep distinguishing Antsquare primarily based on quality. Quality in the usage of the application, quality in terms of the buyers and sellers and ofcourse quality of the product that are being sold.

Although antsquare has rough competition, by differing itself in high quality products, a unique business model and a strong team behind the start up company, they are convinced that they will grow into one of the largest e-commerce platform on a global scale.

Posted on 06/04/2016