Page365 gets seed funding to push forward in Thailand’s $500M Facebook commerce industry

Page365, a dashboard for sellers in Thailand who run Facebook shops, has secured US$420,000 in seed funding, the startup revealed today. The investment comes from Inspire Ventures and Galaxy Ventures.

Page365 works by providing a dashboard (pictured below) for Facebook sellers that separates out text into things like inquiries, orders, and complaints. Merchants pay a subscription to use it.

The startup’s founders, Lusarun Silpsrikul and Prathan Thananart, say that sales on Facebook and other social media sites in Thailand is set to top US$510 million this year. It’s a niche area that’s proving popular as an alternative to setting up shop on an estore like Rakuten’s Tarad.

By the admission of the team, social commerce is not exactly accelerating in relation to spending on conventional ecommerce stores, but the pot is growing in size as ecommerce in general becomes more commonplace in the country. Rakuten’s Tarad anticipates a sales volume of US$23 billion in 2014, so social commerce as a whole represents only about two percent of expenditure on the top online store in the country.

Adrian Stewart, partner at Galaxy Ventures, observes:

The overall ecommerce pie is growing and social media’s share has kept pace with matched growth and this tells us a lot about online consumers and the merchants who sell to them. Thailand is still very much in love with the informality of shopping, even in the physical space street-side vendors sell their goods alongside glitzy shopping malls, we see this trend continuing online via Facebook and other social media sites.

In the past year, Page365 has grown from a few dozen merchants to 9,000 at present. it has also added in support for Line, the popular messaging app. Its biggest move so far is launching a private beta for merchants in Vietnam. (Update: Added in this paragraph with details provided by Stewart.)

In our interview last year with the Page365 team, the founders explained that “there is huge value in the social aspect of Facebook as an ecommerce platform, such as viral effects and impulse buying, that will be unattainable with other sales platforms.”

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