Second Wave Covid-19 & E-Commerce in Trinidad & Tobago

If the first wave didn’t make you jump off your offline backside back in March, you need a good bull pistle. Now, well into the second wave, meaner and nastier than before, and I’m referring to both Covid-19 and your government, what are you going to do?

It reminds me of ‘the Lord will save me’ joke where one is waiting heavenly help and refusing all earthly lifelines. Years from now when stories will be told of how Covid-19 decimated the land, there will be stories of how it also brought out E-Commerce in Trinidad & Tobago after years of obscurity.

I’ve said in my blog and Facebook posts that the first wave leapfrogged local E-Commerce over a few levels of organic growth. I also said it would remain there. This second wave will do the same thing— and we’re going to stay at the new level, AGAIN.

There’s no one on the fence anymore, those days are long gone; now it’s only regret. You cudaa, wudda, shudda, but you didn’t. If you did, it didn’t work, Trini’s were not receptive, you gave up and let the site expire.

You didn’t listen to me, like one client who spend tens of thousands on Magento store years ago but didn’t have the patience to keep it going, then called me to see if I kept anything. I didn’t; you said you didn’t want it anymore. Then a more recent case of a client with several stores all in the malls that also found that their customers were not receptive and let the site die after only a few months; and after spending over $30K on it, full inventory sync and everything.

This Covid-19 era, new online stores keep coming. It’s hard to be fully objective of course, I mean, would I really say my competitors are doing a great job? However, I haven’t seen any close to my best one so far, which is Bel Air Store of Marabella (visit here). I would say it’s the best performing online store in the country right now, that all competitors are noticing. What does it take to pull off a store like this? A huge team and a lot of money. Such a site is impossible if you don’t have my experience. My full decade of it was brought fully to bear.

This site may well be the local Amazon the public has been waiting for, and the one you were probably hoping to be. And you’re not going to be happy to hear this, there’s room for only one Amazon in my portfolio, sorry.

In the rush to ride the Covid wave, online stores are getting churned out a dime a dozen. WordPress and WiPay has made it very easy to launch on a budget, but unfortunately it shows. If you don’t understand functional aspects like payment gateways, shipping options and the technical side of Woo Commerce then do-it-yourself will severely limit you and you’ll need a web designer. Then there’s the visual aspects of professional looking design. I’m telling you, a serious online store that means business cannot be done on a budget.

Such sites will eventually lose all their novelty when put though the wringer by the unforgiving Trini (and Tobago-e) customer.

If the site’s not up to par with the American experience it will eventually die a natural death. Many reasons why this can occur:

• Poor visuals- site looking unprofessional, cheap
• Cumbersome and hard to navigate
• Slow site, pages taking long to load
• Small catalog with sparsely populated categories
• Poor catalog- bad images, descriptions
• Lack of frequent updates

You may have the best online experience but the offline experience will be the death of you. All that savvy online courtship ultimately passes off to real human interaction where you reveal your true face, you know, without the makeup. Some of these are:

• Slow to acknowledge order via phone or email by actual employee
• Long delivery times, 5 to 7 days after the order
• Long wait times for curbside pick-up
• Products out of stock, having to substitute
• Poor customer service, customer can’t get to speak to someone about their order
• Depending solely on TT Post for shipping

This offline experience is a huge deal people, I can’t tell you how tremendously critical this is for the success of an online store— especially a Trini one. It won’t matter how fine and dandy your website is, the professional graphics, the cool bells and whistles, flashing lights and dancing monkeys; when it comes down with interacting with you or your staff personally, that experience could blow it. And given the tried and true Trini style of business, most will.

I’m seeing many multivendor marketplaces as well but in my experience that’s also hard to pull off. The logistics of this is a nightmare. Basically, the marketplace is one store but fulfillment is from many vendors. Ten products from ten vendors means ten people have to mobilize for me to deliver my single order. Will I get one delivery or multiple deliveries? Will what I order be in stock? Who manages and keeps track of inventory, the marketplace admin or the vendor?

And again, the potential to fizzle will come as a result of the on and offline experiences I described above. It’s not TOTALLY impossible, but very difficult to pull off. I could though, but will I? Only time will tell. Dare I plant that seed in your head to get you tootoolbay? Maybe it’s coming, who knows…

Even if you get the robust enough marketplace platform in WordPress, the many moving parts that need to come together to make it work seamlessly in both back and front end makes this very challenging. For a robust long term online marketplace, Magento would be the optimal platform. However, if you don’t have around $200K lying around just for the start, forget about it.

Other aspects that make this an uphill battle are:

• The experience and expertise to manage it
• Integrating vendor payments from online sales
• Managing vendors’ available stock
• Delivery logistics from multiple vendors

While this time around there won’t be any shortage of vendor sign-ups (the main complaint pre-Covid), there’ll also be no shortage of headaches in managing them. After all, they are Trinis. Some factors to be specific are:

• Keeping track of their stock availability
• Getting them to organize their product catalog
• Obtaining high quality product images and descriptions
• Getting timely commission payments to them
• Having orders ready for delivery in timely manner

I had toyed with this idea during the first wave lockdown but eventually abandoned it. I was hoping to provide an affordable solution for the small businesses that had to shutter from the stay-at-home order, but the more I thought of it, this model, while sound in theory, won’t be effective.

In this model, you pay a monthly subscription for a pre-made online store for up to a certain number of products. While it’s meant to be affordable and turnkey, the customer-facing side will always deliver a less than stellar user experience. This is no fault of the vendor, but the fault of the provider, which will usually be an individual or small operation. The web design skills needed for this are my level, and it’s too much work for me to pull off efficiently and effectively.

This pandemic left most all online stores scrambling to become relevant. None bothered to tend to their site to keep it ticking over which would have prepared them for this day. Nor did they bother to work their site to figure out what was wrong with it. When I made one of my first local online purchases two years ago, it was on the Courts website and it took a few days for a phone call to confirm. Then I went to pick-up in Freeport, ‘greeted’ by a surely warehouse attendant with no manners

Then two weeks later the chair broke while a family member was sitting on it (it was a 5 pc breakfast set), which took another two months resolve. Suffice it to say the replacements also broke and now I have four very reliable Rubbermaid chairs around the table doing a fine job. Ask me if I’m going to buy anything from Courts again?

Bottom line, when the reality of online hit us all hard, there was no site to say “All my training has prepared me for this moment”, because none were (except mine).

Though the online payment thing has been all figured out for a long time now. Merchants are still confused about them. There are new options as well which I haven’t thoroughly reviewed because they were dismissed by my initial assessment. I will name them for the record,: Fygaro and Zotapay.

As the first bona fide first world standard payment gateway available in Trinidad & Tobago, and offered by all local banks, they are still the optimal solution in terms of functionality and support. But being top drawer comes with a price: $100 USD monthly fee and expensive processing fees up to 5%. But it’s not FAC’s fault, it’s courtesy your friendly neighborhood bloodsucking banks. There’s also the one time integration fee which can’t seem to drop.

Until our banks drop the monthly fee, I’ll consider developing my own plug-in for a cheaper integration for my clients. Don’t hold your breath.

WiPay fights tooth and nail to hold true to Trini style operation. I like this company and I’ve been really rooting for it but, lawd Aldwyn (WiPay’s CEO), put things in place for good customer service. Unfortunately I can’t will the chicken that is WiPay into soaring like an eagle. Their style of operation has remained EXACTLY as it was when I was introduced to them years ago. Once they fix themselves, they’ll be formidable. Being the only payment aggregator in town doesn’t make them formidable, it makes them the only choice.

There are a number of deficiencies with the WiPay service in live applications:

• No outage notices to their merchants even when their own gateway (FAC) announces
• No timely response to inquiries for processing errors faced by shoppers on a site
• Deficiency with their plug-in when using on-site currency converters
• No USD WordPress plug-in

Perhaps another aggregator to challenge WiPay will come, and I’m sure there will. In the meantime I’m still looking for solid solutions as I seek my clients’ interest first.

I don’t have a local client to make such evaluation and nor does CX Pay, the Curacao based payment gateway trying to make inroads here in T&T. On paper CX Pay is the best solution: just below FAC and above WiPay. The main selling point for me is that they are a getaway just like FAC but more affordable. I was able to negotiate very good rates:

• Startup fee: USD $25 (instead of $50)
• Setup fee for a WordPress site (single site): USD $25 (instead of $50)

So that’s a cost of just $50 USD to accept credit cards via CX Pay

I don’t know the fees from the banks themselves, and they are limited to being offered by only two banks in Trinidad & Tobago, Scotiabank ad CIBC. However, I’m in the process of integrating my first client so I’ll be putting them thought the paces soon. I am optimistic, the company looks to be solid and well backed.

I would choose a merchant account payment solution like FAC or CX Pay over an aggregator like WiPay. WiPay will always be a budget solution and never one for hardcore E-Commerce. But that’s their model anyway, same as PayPal. However, like PayPal they may eventually offer similar merchant solutions for the hardcore. Unfortunately WiPay hasn’t mastered the ‘soft-core’ space it’s been in for all the years they’ve been in operation, so also don’t hold your breath.

This has been a perennial problem from day one. One aspect is the integrated delivery cost calculation and service notification when using a delivery service that covers the entire Trinidad & Tobago, even the remote areas, and there is only one- TT Post.

The “All my training has prepared me for this moment” analogy is very apt here. If they could have taken their cue from the United States Postal Service which used online shopping delivery to take up the slack from the severe reduction in ‘snail-mail’ deliveries, they could have taken the time to develop and prepare for this aspect, instead of devoting resources to launch their Hummingbird skybox service.

But as a true Trini government operation, it’s run by political appointees and generally dotish people who can’t roll out postal codes in a postage stamp size country.

According to the postal code status page of the TT Post website:

• The Postal Code System is completed for the entire of Trinidad and Tobago and therefore postal codes are available for all addresses.
• Areas Completed and Launched- Tobago, Boroughs of Arima, Chaguanas and Point Fortin, Regional Corporations of Sangre Grande, Princes Town.
• Areas in progress- Regional Corporations of Sipara, Penal/ Debe, Diego Martin, Tunapuna/Piarco and Mayaro/Rio Claro and San Fernando City Corporation.
• Areas to be engaged – Port of Spain City Corporation, Regional Corporations of San Juan/Laventille and Couva/Tabaquite/Talparo.

All these areas rolled out and no list of postal codes of at least the rolled-out areas readily available. You would think that the entire country-wide list would be published by now. Nobody at TT Post can provide this list. I suspect its being kept under a director’s bed.

Again, true to being a government operation, it never dawned on them to work hand in hand with the Ministry of Trade & Industry as they struggled to implement their National E-Commerce Policy. Not that I ever expected anything to come out of the implementation, the point of which is now moot as E is Commercing itself without assistance. However, some government support of the infrastructure to enable would be in order. Is that too much to ask? Yes it is. Expect nothing from any T&T government in power, especially this one and you won’t be disappointed.

Just remember YOU put them back there because they did such a stellar job last five years they deserved an encore. So take what what you get and like it.

I’ve had clients use TT Post to deliver customer orders as recently as the last couple of months so the experiences are very fresh. The feedback is that TT Post is TERRIBLE to the point that if you don’t want to lose customers then stay clear of TT Post. Deliveries take days to deliver after pick-up and no one at TT Post seems to know anything about it when you inquire. They are a complete waste of time. The only reason to use would be for Tobago deliveries as there are no other alternatives.

You’re better off using your own vehicles or some other private courier in Trinidad. Even though there still is —>

While UPSL has a WordPress plug-in available that not only calculates delivery fees by area on the checkout page, it also gets notified about the order upon submission. This allows for easy notification when order is ready for pick-up. The only thing is that it’s very expensive to integrate.

Their delivery fees vary by area classification into Metro, Extended and Remote. However, some extended and remote areas in Tobago are not served.

The second disadvantage of UPSL is that you need to have the product weight fields filled out for your entire catalog as their delivery rates are calculated on the total weight of the order. And to give you an example of the rates for the the lowest tier, 1-20 lbs:

• $25 Metro Areas
• $45 Extended Areas
• $70 Remote Areas

And these prices are VAT exclusive. UPSL also appears to use physical weights and not volumetric weights like the big shippers. It is also possible to use UPSL without rate integration which will save the trouble of setting predetermined product weights, i.e. just use them as a courier by opening an account and calling them when your orders are ready for delivery.

No. Not for T&T deliveries. We don’t need complex shipping options like next day, 3-day and all that. I recommend setting flat rates and calling that George. It’s possible to set up shipping zones in Woo Commerce and have different prices for different areas, especially say, the remote areas. Postal codes would make it easier to mange these zones, but not absolutely necessary, it can be done without it with simple workarounds.

You only need integrated delivery for outside T&T, that is, if you have your sight (site?) set on the wider Caribbean. For that there is DHL, but there is no challenge here, it’s easily integrated. I know because I done done it; see here on this beauty of a site I done done too: Dazza Cricket Gear.

Like the rest of the world, there’s room for everyone. The behemoth that it is, Amazon is not putting online stores out of business, nor stopping new ones. Our local market is no different. There’s room for all manner of online stores, small, big and in-between. As long as your store appeals to the customer you’re targeting, you’ll be in good shape.

Again, let’s do the ‘mats’: your neighborhood ‘parlor’ does just fine in it’s own geographic space just like all the rest up and down the country does in theirs. What if they doubled their reach would the own be happy. If they double their reach they’ll still be in their own locality. If they tripe their reach, same thing. Ten times, same thing, and still the same town. Online reach is more than a thousand parlors in two islands at least , not to mention the Caribbean. Take my word, there’s room for all.

That’s all, plain and simple, no rocket science, no big ‘mats’. Is that so difficult? Yes it is if you’re a red blooded Trini. It’s the main reason why many of these new online stores, Amazon-type stores, multivendor marketplaces etc. will fail. This is something I’ve been preaching in all my years of E-Commerce advice. And to remind you, the American experience is all that you experience on US sites that you love. And what you like for you, so too your customer.

If you’re a web designer like me, and no one is :), what a time to be alive. If you’re a online shopper, again, what a time to be alive. The pandemic sucks yes, but it’s outside of our control. There’s the bad, the good, the bad in the good, the good in the bad, this is the good in the bad. Count your blessings and run.