Senjō Group, a global payments operator and fintech investment firm, announced on Thursday it has formed a partnership and invested $1.2 million in Singapore-based B2B service, Tjaara Pte. Ltd.
Tjaara, or “Marketplace” in Arabic, reportedly acts as a global purchaser to numerous unaligned wholesalers and businesses in the market and aids the process on their behalf. The company negotiates, does quality control checks from factory to port, and even acts as an escrow service to manage the complicated buying process between Chinese manufacturers and foreign companies. Its customers are businesses or individuals that wish to monetize their relationships with end-users.
Fred Then, Co-Founder of Tjaara, stated:
“Tjaara is a B2B service that offers product search, language translation support, ordering, logistics and finance management. We realized that a lot of smaller and medium-sized retailers were unable to navigate Mandarin-only manufacturer listings or access factory-direct prices. Tjaara was built to help our end-users unlock a larger variety of products and larger profit margins through economies-of-scale. Unlike typical agents, Tjaara is also able to assist with product evaluation by obtaining samples for end-users; this is possible because of our close relationship with manufacturers.”
Then then explains:
“It is known that Chinese wholesale e-commerce platforms like Alibaba offer lower prices for local purchases, and when non-Chinese IP addresses are detected, the price is typically inflated. This is why Tjaara will always get better pricing as all buying is done locally through our China operations. And by consolidating the orders of small wholesalers, we’ll get more bulk discounts.”
Tjaara’s platform is currently invite-only, and only vetted customers may log in to use its services. Customers may also view translated listings or request for a search for products; every Partner is allocated 50 complimentary translation requests per month. A mobile app is also in the works to create even easier access. Sam Evans, Vice President of Business Development and Head of Ventures, Senjō Group, then revealed:
“Tjaara is well-placed as a business to make it through less-than-ideal economic times, for instance when global demands are falling. More than ever, SMEs will need means of cost savings, and wouldn’t it be even better if these don’t impact product quality? It was in this that we saw great potential in Tjaara, and realised that they were aligned with our core business objective of addressing market inefficiencies.”
Then added:
“We are extremely excited by the generous support offered by Senjō, and their faith in us. The biggest plus of working with an experienced partner like Senjō is definitely their expertise in payment systems and existing global footprint and connections. This will make our lives a lot easier. We are looking forward to scaling to greater heights with their support.”
Tjaara has been secretly researched for nearly two years and was recently incorporated in August 2016. The soft launch will happen sometime in Q1 2017, and it plans to launch fully in Q3 2017. The business will initially focus on the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and North Africa.