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Arnold Sebastian: Introducing online business to schools
If you wish to buy song birds and domestic pets without going to a pet shop, or even buy clothing, electronics and automotive products, a young programer from The Netherlands, Arnold Sebastian (30), has produced an online business site to facilitate your needs
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f you wish to buy song birds and domestic pets without going to a pet shop, or even buy clothing, electronics and automotive products, a young programer from The Netherlands, Arnold Sebastian (30), has produced an online business site to facilitate your needs.
JP/INDRA HARSAPUTRA
“We are also making some breakthroughs for easier access to safe transactions,” Arnold Sebastian, president director of the site, tokobagus.com, told The Jakarta Post recently in Surabaya.
Poultry and bird transactions without going to a bird market can also be an alternative to reduce the spread of avian flu among birds and from poultry to men, he pointed out. According to the National Commission for Avian Flu Control, Indonesia’s bird market management is still below average and there’s fear the H5N1 virus may spread.
Arnold said he provided information for users on how to perform payment transactions safely in the virtual world, in view of the absence of a legal umbrella for businesses on the Internet in Indonesia.
“We’re visiting schools and colleges to guide students doing business on the Internet. Apart from reducing the negative impact of the Internet, we also want to cultivate the spirit of entrepreneurship among students,” he said.
Arnold indicated many students in Bali were starting online businesses, offering various products from sports articles, works of art to computer software.
“They have direct transactions with buyers. For the moment, we apply the escrow system in online transactions to better guarantee safety,” he said. Since its launch five years ago, tokobagus.com has had more than 20 million visitors monthly with more than 300,000 members.
Arnold said that besides free ads, customers could also receive promotion facilities and become verified members for free to boost ads quality and sales, and be optimized for search engines so that ads are easily found in Google, Yahoo and Live (now Bing).
Arnold has introduced his site through the printed media and radio, even also frequently joining cellular and IT exhibitions among others in Surabaya. He has also presented his site to other major cities in Indonesia.
“I see very high online business market potential in Indonesia. Yesterday, I noticed junior high school students using BlackBerries or browsing the Internet with laptops at school,” he noted.
E-commerce or transactions on the Internet emerged in 1996 with the emergence of sanur.com, which adopted the model of amazon.com, the US online bookstore. Though initially unpopular, other sites appeared in the same year such as karzymarket.com and kakilima.com.
Despite their downtrend during the monetary crisis in Indonesia in 1998, e-commerce was jacked up again after the appearance of online news sites such as detik.com and astaga.com.
When the virtual world era began in Indonesia, Arnold was still studying at the School of Information Technology, James Madison University, in the US. After graduating in 1999, Arnold, born in Gouda, Holland, worked as a freelance programmer in several companies there.
He worked hard to follow the footsteps of Jeff Bezos, CEO of amazon.com in mid-2000, when he spent his summer vacation in Denpasar, Bali.
“At the time, I used to read news sites and found several e-commerce sites in Indonesia. I saw many opportunities in Indonesia as there were only a handful of players, while the number of Internet users was on the rise,” he recalled.
Yahoo Indonesia research in 2009 showed one in three city dwellers in Indonesia could access the Internet.
Based on internetworldstats.com, the number of Internet users in Indonesia has grown by more than 1,000 percent in the past 10 years and in 2008 these users totaled 25 million.
The country’s Internet users however still constitute a relatively small part or around 10 percent of Indonesia’s population of 237.5 million. Actually, Internet users in China, in comparison, have reached 253 million or 19 percent of the population.
Internet users, according to Yahoo Indonesia, are mostly teenagers aged 15-19 (64 percent), who use the Internet for email (59 percent), instant messaging (59 percent) and social networking (58 percent). They also frequently use search engines (56 percent), access online news (47 percent), write blogs (36 percent) and play online games (35 percent).
With business opportunities wide open, Arnold changed his vacation plans, originally slated for only several days in Bali.
In September 2005, Arnold launched tokobagus.com in Bali, where the head office of this activity is based. “I chose ‘toko’ because in this site every user gets a domain or shop [toko], while the word ‘bagus’ [good] seems easily remembered by Indonesians,” he explained.
As most stories of technology business, Arnold also began his tokobagus.com in a very simple way. While Bill Gates, the boss of Microsoft, and Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Inc, started their business in garages, Arnold also ran his tokobagus.com in a leased house with only three employees.
In 2005 and 2006, only tens of thousands visited tokobagus.com.Arnold has since improved the site. “I also promoted the site through TV and various other media but the impact wasn’t significant,” he said.
Luckily, in early 2008, the number of Internet users grew further in Indonesia, with at least 31 million Internet protocol (IP) addresses. With a rising number of visitors and members, Arnold recruited more employees, now totaling 14.
