TO alleviate the financial hardship of Petaling Street’s trader fraternity, e-commerce platform Shopee has teamed up with the KL Hawkers and Petty Traders Association to bring Petaling Street traders online in time for the upcoming Chinese New Year (CNY) celebration.
Life has been a struggle for many petty traders at Petaling Street – fondly known as Malaysia’s Chinatown – with many of them succumbing to losses of up to 95% due to the ongoing movement control order (MCO 2.0) exercise.
This Petaling Street Goes Ong-Line joint initiative by the association and Shopee will see participating traders being promoted under the “Buy Malaysia” initiative on Shopee (their products will be marketed and sold nationwide on Shopee).
“The colourful and bustling Petaling Street is now completely empty as MCO 2.0 has restricted customers to visit our stores,” Kuala Lumpur Hawkers and Petty Traders Association chairman Datuk Ang Say Tee pointed out.
“Our members now have an oversupply of Chinese New Year (CNY) paraphernalia, ox-related clothing and so much more.”
With this partnership, Ang hopes Malaysians will support Petaling Street vendors by purchasing their CNY needs from them while helping to protect the legacy of Petaling Street at the same time.
To kickstart the initiative, there will be more than 1,500 items by Petaling Street traders being offered in a special Petaling Street Goes Ong-Line collection on Shopee, just in time to usher in the Year of the Ox. Deals start from as low as 88 sen.
Participating traders will also get to enjoy a surge in customer traffic seeing as the Shopee 2.2 CNY Sale is currently taking place on the platform, and will end on Feb 13.
“We read about the struggles of Datuk Ang and the Petaling Street vendors in the news, and our team came up with this idea to recreate the Petaling Street experience online,” noted Shopee’s regional managing director Ian Ho.
“While we recognise that these are short-term measures, we believe it can offer some cash flow relief and we will continue to find new ways to extend the support to these traders even after CNY.”
Additionally, the traders will be able to take advantage of the free Shopee University e-commerce workshops.
Available in Mandarin, Bahasa Malaysia and English, it will assist the traders in getting to know the hacks of online selling which has groomed more than 30,000 online sellers to become successful online businesses in 2020 alone. – Feb 1, 2021
