The first website for 65daigou was not coded. It was drawn. The founding team sketched the interface in Paint, the plain Windows drawing program, and only later paid developers to build it properly. The company was named for Singapore's dialling code, 65, plus the Chinese word for a personal shopper.
It began in 2010 as a favour turned business. Ezbuy's cofounders were a few Chinese students and young graduates in Singapore. After a trip to China, one of them, He Jian, was struck by how much more choice was on Chinese shopping sites. He suggested the same thing for Southeast Asian shoppers: tell us what you want, and we will buy it, inspect it, ship it and handle the returns. Wendy Liu said yes. They started from his apartment, and in the early days they packed and delivered orders by hand.
What nobody outside the business paid much attention to was how hard the model was to scale.
Liu's route there was unusual. She is an only child who moved from China to Singapore at 17 and has described herself as having been quite a little princess at home. She graduated from NTU with first-class honours in electrical engineering and a business minor, taking extra e-commerce modules, then did a Master's at NUS while working full-time. That meant studying by herself after hours.
What nobody outside the business paid much attention to was how hard the model was to scale. They owned no marketplace. They stood between a customer and sellers on someone else's site, and Taobao accused them of scalping. Every order was a small act of trust.
The company turned a corner by becoming a hub rather than a middleman. IDG Capital and CGC Capital backed a Series A in 2015. In 2016 it rebranded to ezbuy and took a US$20 million Series B led by Vision Knight Capital, then added Prime membership and a quick-delivery service. By 2018 it said it had more than 3 million loyal fans and 10,000 sellers across six marketplaces, and raised a US$17.6 million pre-Series C.
Then came the squeeze. Lazada pushed hard at the same shoppers, and in 2018 NASDAQ-listed LightInTheBox bought ezbuy for a reported US$86 million, by one reported figure. He Jian became LightInTheBox's chief executive.
The founders' path is useful because it is so unpolished. They began with a favour, a flat and a drawing program. Customers were not buying software; they were buying someone's promise to stand behind an order.