It was not an ordinary day as the workers, who are mostly under 25 years old, attempted to meet the sales target set for the annual event, called National Online Shopping Day (Harbolnas).

“If you look at the conveyor belts [which move ordered goods], they never stop,” said Lazada Indonesia spokeswoman Astrid Puspitasari.

“[Usually], some shelves would probably still be vacant. Now, they’re already full,” she said.

Astrid said the company’s Indonesian unit this year was expected to book twice the revenue it recorded in last year’s Harbolnas.

The company, in which Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has a majority stake, reportedly booked Rp 143.3 billion (US$10.8 million) in revenue through transactions made on the first day of the 2016 Harbolnas.

The company, which has continued to chair Harbolnas since last year, launched the event at 10 p.m. on Monday, and saw the number of visitors to its platform jump to three times the amount on regular days, breaking its own record.

“Maybe right now, it’s even more,” Lazada Group co-CEO Florian Holm said.

Online marketplaces are upbeat with this year’s Harbolnas as they offer discounts of up to 90 percent, but customers may seem less enthusiastic this time as they are more cautious of promotions.

Ahmad Irfan Rinaldi, 31, a manager at Samsung Electronics Indonesia, created a wish list two months ago for things he wanted to buy for this year’s Harbolnas, but he kept monitoring the prices and would only make purchases if the discounts were reasonable.

“Last year, a lot of discounts were fake as [the online marketplaces] marked up the prices before lowering them back to the normal level,” he said.

Nevertheless, Irfan, who mostly shops online for plastic Gundam Wing models, said the promotions this year were relatively better as there were more “real discounts”.

Bhima Yudhistira Adhinegara, 28, an economist at the Institute for Development of Economics and Finance (Indef), is another customer who suspects that “fake discounts” remain in this year’s Harbolnas, prompting him to refrain from buying anything despite already having his own wish list.

“A lot of my favorite goods are still at the previous price. They put ‘90 percent off’ labels, but they raised the prices first,” he said.

Last year, the Harbolnas event failed to reach its target of Rp 6 trillion in transactions, booking only Rp 3.3 trillion, but still saw 57.14 percent growth compared to the Rp 2.1 trillion it saw in 2015.

According to global survey company PT Nielsen Indonesia, a majority of customers were disappointed with the promotions offered.

The Harbolnas committee decided to be more realistic with this year’s event, setting a target of Rp 4 trillion, lower than 2016, with 254 e-commerce platforms participating. The event has also been shortened from three days to only a day, said Achmad Alkatiri of the Harbolnas organizing committee.

Aziz Warisman, 30, a learning course manager, is another customer who paid more attention to price tags in this year’s Harbolnas before deciding to buy a pair of new sneakers, as he had to pay off a mortgage.

He is interested in big discounts offered during Harbolnas, but he plans to purchase items according to his budget and will refrain from impulse buys.

Communications and Information Minister Rudiantara has called on e-commerce players to improve consumer protection through careful screenings of sellers as people have been discouraged from shopping online due to many cases of fraud. (srs)

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