Founder Spotlight: JJ Tan of EAMR, Conveniently Bringing Sales Exhibitions to Your Rooms

Founder Spotlight: JJ Tan of EAMR, Conveniently Bringing Sales Exhibitions to Your Rooms

By Ysa Lauta

Coming in as the first “smart marketplace”, Exhibition At My Room or EAMR, as the name implies, allows you to attend sales exhibitions without the need to go out of your rooms. Through this, merchants are able to analyze price data and price their products effectively, and at the same time, allow end consumers to monitor the price.

TechShake talked to EAMR founder and CEO JJ Tan to know more about this new technology:

E-commerce has been rapidly growing for the past years, can you share with us how you came up with EAMR?

EAMR is the abbreviation for Exhibition At My Room. So as though the name suggests you could attend any exhibition all in your room. When I say exhibition, it means sales exhibition. As a consumer, we are constantly looking out for sales. But the thing is, how much should it be for it to be considered a sale? Let’s say I'm looking to buy an item and the price is at $20. When the seller reduces the item from the original price to $19, to some people, the merchant is already running a sale. But to me, that’s not a sale. I'm looking for at least 20% less or even more. So for me to consider it a sale, the merchant has to reduce the price to at least 16 to $15. Thinking about this made me realize that there's a gap between the buyer and the merchant. This is where EAMR comes in. What we do is help the seller price the product effectively by giving them the price data. On the other hand, we also help the buyers by allowing them to monitor the product’s price. So if you’re a consumer and you’re looking to buy item A for about 15 to $16, we monitor that for you and when the price matches, you will be notified. Basically this EAMR is a smart marketplace.

Can you share how EAMR works? How many clients and users do you have right now?

It’s very simple as a consumer, you just have to key in the product name that you're looking for, and the minimum and maximum price you’re willing to spend. That's all you need to do on our platform. We call this the live deal function because the deal is live. Thus, the system monitors the deal for you When there’s a price match, you will be notified. The good thing is that the system can help you monitor multiple products at once. You can input 50, 500, a thousand products into the live deal, and all these will be monitored at the same time.

We are presently available only in Singapore, so most of our merchants are based here. We have more than 327,000 registered users in Singapore and more than 3,400 merchants. Of course, we are planning to expand and are raising funds to do so. Our target is the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, US, China, and India.

What kind of products do you offer in your platform?

Presently, we have four categories that we focus on: electronics, health and wellness, beauty and fashion, and lastly, baby products. Electronics is the most popular with about 33% to 34% of our sales. But of course, we are planning to expand. As the concept of smart marketplace is very innovative, in the future, we want to include flight details, hotels, even furniture and other products. This concept is very versatile.

What kind of impact has EAMR in the e-commerce industry?

I would say that the situation with the pandemic and how it has affected our lifestyle gave us a big advantage in this e-commerce industry. We are seeing very positive growth for the past nine to 10 months. In Singapore COVID-19 started in late January to early February and since then, people have been working from home. Because of this, there are so many things that they need to take care of. At the same time, there are things that they need to purchase however they couldn’t go out. So what our users would do is while they are working from the comfort of their own homes, they use our platform. It’s as if having a virtual shopping assistant. I’m the boss and there’s this platform that acts like a virtual shopping assistant that helps me find what I need within a decided budget. So that is the kind of impact that EAMR has on the consumers. This is also good for the merchants because as they aren’t aware of the demand curve, they do not know how much to price products effectively in order for them to optimize their sales. But with our demand data, they can actively play with the price. So right now, the sellers on our platform, they're actively trying to gain by pricing the products based on the demand and transacting with buyers. 

How do you see EAMR in the next five years?

Everyone only has 24 hours a day, but there are more and more tasks to fulfill. Therefore, people have less time for shopping and less time to look for things they want. But this doesn’t mean they want to stop shopping. People still love buying things. So in the next five years, I think there will be an expansion of the smart marketplace. There will be other new businesses and startups coming up with the same concept. Just like in the taxi industry, less and less people are taking the traditional taxi and more and more people are taking Uber, Gojek or Grab;  less and less people will go to traditional marketplaces and more will shop virtually. More and more people will be using the live deal function. Traditional marketplaces then have to change their business models because traffic will no longer be a revenue generator for that marketplace. 

Can you describe EAMR in one sentence?

EAMR is a small marketplace where we use demand and supply data to promote transactions.

Click here to know more about EAMR.