HKTV mall founder Ricky Wong remains upbeat about the future of Hong Kong’s highest-profile online shopping site despite mounting losses.
“We lose half a million dollars a day. Every day I drive a Mercedes Benz into Victoria Harbour. We are not making money – we are investing in the future,” Wong told the Omni-Channel Retailing Conference seminar organised by Diversified and KPMG in Causeway Bay Thursday.
“If we were looking for a return on investment, we’d close down tomorrow.”
Wong’s mall – which has recently extended into physical stores where customers can see some of the products available online – sells “everything from diamonds to soy sauce”. Some 3 million people visit the site each month, but sales are running at only between 25,000 and 30,000 stock units a day.
Wong says the company is focusing on how to convert visitors to shoppers.
“We have 100,000 people coming to our website every day, but only a few thousand are ordering. They’re using our apps, but they don’t buy anything.
“The problem we have now is we don’t know what’s happening.”
Wong believes a major barrier to increasing sales is the lack of delivery vehicles, which is leading to delivery times of up to four days.
“There is a demand [for online retail] in Hong Kong but there is no supply. We could double our sales overnight.”
The company currently has 75 delivery trucks, each handling up to 60 orders a day. Thirty more are scheduled to join the fleet by Christmas and Wong expects to have as many as 200 on the road by the end of 2017.
“People might ask why don’t you contract other companies to deliver. The answer is that our trucks are unique – they are designed to carry frozen goods, chilled goods and goods at room temperature. No-one else has these trucks.”
He says the advantage of this is that when customers order across multiple categories the entire order can be delivered at once.
In March or April next year HKTV mall will deploy a new computerised warehousing system which Wong previewed to the seminar audience via a video. The pick and packing system, designed in Europe, will allow one person to handle some 6000 orders in a day.  
He said HKTV mall’s three-year plan is to become “the only and the largest online shopping mall in Hong Kong” serving 25 per cent of households.
And the company wants to engage better with customers.
Online shopping gave shoppers more control over what they buy because of the vastly greater number of stock units you can display on a website compared to in a physical store.
“Today the merchandisers decide what the customers are going to buy. Sorry, if there are any merchandisers here, but you’re going to lose your job. Because you add no value.”