Pattaya City is home to many tech businesses and websites catering to the local market, but we seldom see many that take on the Thai startup market and operate at the national level. Vinny, Dave and Veera, three local boys from Pattaya decided to do just that and founded Dinoza.com to tap into Thailand’s massive ecommerce potential.
Veera, the CEO of Dinoza recalls, “Everyone wants a sexy new smartphone. The sleek look and feel, perfect weight in your palms, the power of a super computer, and access to the online world at your fingertips. Unfortunately the price of modern mobile phones is way over the mark for many people and it becomes impractical to buy the latest Apple iPhone or Samasung Galaxy S6 Edge Plus.
CMO Dave Malhotra (L) and CEO Veera Palsingh (R) at the Start It Up Bangkok event held on 7th November 2015.
“It was with this in mind that we founded Dinoza.com. We promise our customers up to 99% savings on mobile phones, tablets and fancy gadgets.”
Although at first look it seems like a regular auction site where a customer can bid on a product or choose to buy it, the site actually works on a Pay-to-Play model. This keeps the auction’s closing price considerably low. Looking at their past auctions, winners do tend to make big savings, with more than 60% of winners saving more than 90% on a product’s price.
This bidder won the Samsung Galaxy J1 auction and saved 99% off retail price.
When asked about what happens to those who don’t win the auction, Vinny (Dinoza’s COO) explains, “We wanted to create a fair and fun shopping experience for our customers. So if a customer who has placed bids in an auction doesn’t win, we return the total value of the bids back to the customer as D-Points. D-Points have the same value as baht and can be used as discounts in our Dinoza Shop to buy whatever the customer fancies. This way the auction winner gets a product for really cheap while those who don’t win get to buy anything from our shop. Everyone wins at Dinoza!”
This iPhone 6 auction ended at 173.40 baht. The lucky winner saved 21,906 baht.
