91APP: Helping Brands Escape the Marketplace

Every brand selling on a marketplace eventually wants its own channel, and 91APP built the tools. This story covers the founding, the omnichannel product, the retail relationships, the competitive position and the limits of a small-market software business — part of the Taiwan Company Stories hub.

Why do brands want their own channels?

Because marketplaces provide traffic while taking margin and owning the customer. A brand selling through a platform pays commission on every transaction, competes on a page alongside substitutes, and receives limited data about who bought and why.

Operating an owned channel reverses this: the brand keeps the margin, controls presentation, retains customer data and can market directly through notifications, membership programmes and personalized offers. The cost is that the brand must generate its own demand.

Most brands end up doing both, using marketplaces for reach and owned channels for loyal customers and higher-margin repeat purchases. Managing that combination requires software that neither marketplaces nor generic e-commerce platforms provide well.

What does the omnichannel problem involve?

Connecting physical stores, online sales, membership and inventory into one system where a customer’s behaviour in any channel informs the others. A shopper who browses online and buys in store, or checks store stock from an app, expects the systems to know about each other.

Retail in Taiwan and much of Asia remains substantially physical, with department stores, chain outlets and convenience retail dominating. Pure e-commerce solutions serve these retailers poorly because they treat stores as separate from digital rather than as part of one customer relationship.

91APP built specifically for this hybrid reality: point-of-sale integration, store staff tools, membership systems that work across channels, and inventory visibility that lets a store fulfil an online order. That local retail understanding is the product’s actual differentiation.

How does the business model work?

Through subscription fees and transaction-based revenue tied to the volume flowing through customers’ channels, which aligns the vendor’s incentives with its clients’ growth and produces revenue that scales with customer success.

The model is attractive because retained customers grow their volume over time, producing revenue expansion without new sales effort. It is also exposed to customer performance: a retailer losing share reduces the vendor’s revenue without any failure of the software.

Enterprise commerce software has high switching costs once integrated into store operations, inventory systems and membership databases, which supports retention but makes initial sales cycles long and implementation-heavy.

What is the competitive landscape?

International platforms such as Shopify at one end, marketplace ecosystems at another, and local competitors and in-house development in between. Each competes on different dimensions: price, feature breadth, local fit and integration depth.

91APP’s position depends on local retail knowledge, Chinese-language capability, integration with Taiwanese payment and logistics providers, and service relationships with retailers who want a vendor that answers the phone locally.

The vulnerability is that global platforms improve their localization over time and bring resources no regional vendor can match. Defending a local software position requires continuous investment in exactly the areas where global competitors are weakest.

What are the growth constraints?

Market size, principally. Taiwan’s retail sector is finite, and a vendor serving it well eventually saturates the addressable base, requiring either regional expansion or deeper penetration of existing customers.

Expansion into Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and other markets brings different retail structures, payment systems, logistics providers and competitive landscapes, each requiring localization investment before generating revenue.

The alternative growth path is upward within customers: more modules, more transaction volume, more services. This is lower risk and produces slower growth, which is the standard tension for regional enterprise software companies.

How does this fit Taiwan’s digital economy?

It represents the practical end of Taiwanese software: business applications solving specific local problems for local customers, rather than global platform ambitions. These companies are less visible than consumer technology but often more durable.

Taiwan’s digital economy also reflects its retail structure. Convenience stores handle e-commerce pickup at scale, mobile payment adoption followed different patterns than in mainland China, and physical retail retained more importance than in some neighbouring markets, as the 7-Eleven Taiwan story describes.

Software serving that environment must be built for it, which creates space for local vendors that global platforms designed around different assumptions cannot easily fill.

What is the lesson for enterprise software founders?

That deep vertical and geographic knowledge beats feature breadth in markets where local integration matters. 91APP does not compete on having more capabilities than global platforms; it competes on working correctly with Taiwanese retail reality.

The second lesson is about alignment. Revenue tied to customer transaction volume creates a genuine partnership incentive and produces expansion revenue, which is far more capital-efficient than continuously acquiring new customers.

The third concerns market ceiling honesty. A software business in a market of twenty-three million must plan its expansion path early, because saturation arrives sooner than in larger economies and the transition to new markets takes years to execute.

What does implementation actually involve?

Connecting a retailer’s point-of-sale system, inventory database, membership records, payment processing and logistics providers into a single platform, then training store staff to use tools that change how they serve customers. It is a systems integration project as much as a software deployment.

This is why sales cycles are long and why switching costs become high. A retailer that has integrated its store operations with a platform, migrated its membership base and trained hundreds of staff does not change vendors casually, even if a competitor offers better features.

It is also why local presence matters. Integration problems require someone who understands the retailer’s existing systems, speaks the language and can attend the store, which global platforms serving many markets thinly cannot provide.

How has retail media changed the business?

By giving retailers a new revenue stream that requires exactly the data infrastructure commerce platforms provide. Retailers with membership data and owned channels can sell advertising and promotional placement to the brands they stock, monetizing customer attention in addition to product margin.

For a platform vendor this creates additional value to sell: audience segmentation, campaign management and measurement tools built on the customer data the retailer already holds. It also raises the strategic importance of owning the channel rather than selling through marketplaces.

The trend has been strongest among large retailers with substantial customer bases, and it reinforces the argument that brands and retailers should invest in their own channels rather than accepting marketplace intermediation permanently.

What is the outlook for regional commerce software?

Consolidation among vendors and increasing sophistication among customers. As retailers mature digitally, they demand more integrated capability and fewer separate tools, which favours platforms with breadth over point solutions.

The competitive threat from global platforms increases as those companies localize more seriously, and the defence requires continuous investment in the integrations, compliance and service depth that constitute local advantage.

Expansion into Southeast Asian markets offers growth but demands the same localization investment in each country, which is why regional software companies typically expand more slowly than their ambitions and their investors would prefer.

How do Taiwanese consumers shop?

Across channels, with strong mobile usage, heavy convenience store involvement in delivery and returns, and continued importance of physical stores and department stores for categories like cosmetics and apparel where seeing the product matters.

Payment behaviour differs from both Western and mainland Chinese norms, with credit cards, mobile payments, convenience store payment and cash on delivery all in significant use, and any commerce platform must support the full range rather than assuming a dominant method.

These specifics create the local software opportunity. A platform built around assumptions from another market will handle Taiwanese logistics, payment and store integration awkwardly, and retailers notice the friction immediately.

What role does membership play?

A central one. Taiwanese retailers operate extensive membership and loyalty programmes, and members represent a disproportionate share of sales, so the systems managing membership identity, points, tiers and personalized offers sit at the heart of retail operations.

For a commerce platform, owning the membership layer is strategically valuable because it connects online and offline behaviour into one customer record, which is the foundation for personalization, retail media and retention marketing.

What happens as retailers mature digitally?

They demand more and pay more. A retailer that begins with a basic online store progresses to membership integration, personalization, retail media and inventory-aware fulfilment, each stage adding modules and increasing the platform’s embeddedness in daily operations.

This maturation is the growth engine for commerce software vendors, since revenue expands within existing accounts without new customer acquisition. It also raises expectations: customers who have mastered basic capability compare their vendor against global platforms and expect comparable sophistication.

What is the argument against owned channels?

That demand generation is expensive and marketplaces provide it. A brand operating its own store must attract every visitor through marketing spend, whereas a marketplace listing appears in front of shoppers already searching, and the commission may be cheaper than the equivalent customer acquisition cost.

The resolution most brands reach is a portfolio: marketplaces for reach and acquisition, owned channels for loyal customers and higher margins. Software that helps manage both, rather than treating them as alternatives, serves that reality better than tools built on either assumption alone.

How does the vendor make money as customers grow?

Through revenue tied to transaction volume alongside subscription fees, so a retailer whose digital channel grows generates more platform revenue without a new contract negotiation. This alignment is the most attractive property of the model.

It also means the vendor’s results reflect its customers’ performance in aggregate, making the business a proxy for the health of the retail sector it serves — a diversified exposure within one market rather than dependence on any single client.

What does the competitive position depend on?

Continuing to integrate more deeply into retail operations than a global platform will bother to. Every payment provider, logistics partner, point-of-sale system and government e-invoicing requirement supported is another reason a retailer stays, and each one is unglamorous work that competitors must also do to compete.

The risk is complacency. Local advantage erodes when a global platform decides a market is worth serious localization investment, and the defence is to keep raising the integration standard rather than assuming distance protects the position.

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