PageAdvisor is set to be South East Asia’s first real-time mobile commerce marketplace mobile app, for home and lifestyle services in the region.
Looking for a plumber to fix that leaky tap at home? A party planner to create a very special birthday party to remember? Or a courier to deliver that all-important package?
Mobile application PageAdvisor will be a game-changer.
Credit: PageAdvisor.com
Now, you will no longer need to make numerous phone calls to many merchants to get what you want. In fact, you can do it simply with a few clicks of the button – which will take only about two minutes of your time. This is all thanks to the newly-launched PageAdvisor – Southeast Asia’s very first real-time mobile commerce marketplace for home and lifestyle services.
This is a bidding-system app – listing some 1,400 companies and over 100 different local home and lifestyle services. Merchants provide real time quotations to the customer, who has requested the service.
Page Advisor is the brainchild of Internet guru Fabian Lim
PageAdvisor is the brainchild of online millionaire entrepreneur, Fabian Lim, 44, who is also the best-selling author of Click! Work Anytime, Live Anywhere. Said Lim, “PageAdvisor is basically a mobile app marketplace for consumers to search for and hire local service providers. In fact, it is like the Uber of local services.”
Lim developed PageAdvisor together with several other fellow entrepreneurs, including Ho Boon Peng, Tan Jian Yong and Jamie Lee – who each have a businesses which have generated total revenues of greater than SGD15 million in 2014 for each owner. Daniel Tan, a high-flying lawyer, is PageAdvisor’s chief operating and legal officer.
As well, PageAdvisor also has Inderjit Singh, the Member Of Parliament for Ang Mo Kio GRC on board as Advisor, together with more than 120 Account Managers and Account Directors, in Singapore alone – most of whom have advanced search engine optimisation certifications.
The brains behind the Page Advisor mobile app – from left to right, Jamie Lee, Ho Boon Peng, Fabian Lim, Tan Jian Yong, Daniel Tan. Photo Credit: PageAdvisor.com
How PageAdvisor was born
How did the idea of PageAdvisor come about? Says Lim, “I have been teaching Internet marketing courses for the past seven years and so I have been focusing on helping students identify online opportunities.” One of the areas that Lim identified, that would help students to make money, is to pick up search engine optimisation and basic website building skills, and act as a middleman between a business and its customers.
“This model has been taught to thousands of students and with the advance of smartphones, I realised that I could create a similar model but using a mobile app. That was when the idea of PageAdvisor came about,” Lim added.
Has a wide variety of local services
As a one-stop shop for all local services, PageAdvisor consists of a wide variety of services. These range from essential home services such as plumbers and piano tuners to lifestyle services such as party planners, home spas, hairdressers and even limousine services. So in this way, PageAdvisor has a wide variety of merchants – for customers to choose from.
Extremely convenient for consumers
Lim says that as a one-stop shop for all local services in Singapore and eventually the region, PageAdvisor will be extremely convenient for consumers. Explained Lim, “We wanted to make it quicker and easier for people to obtain local services – so we offer more than a hundred home services with just a few clicks and swipes of your mobile phone. So there will be no researching or calling or talking to merchants to engage their services. It is also very efficient, as customers will be able to get instantaneous live bids from our merchant pool.”
PageAdvisor is the brainchild of Internet guru Fabian Lim.
Credit: PageAdvisor.com
Indeed, to use the PageAdvisor mobile app, all consumers have to do is to choose the service that he wants, answer a series of short questions and then fill in the date and time that he needs his job to be performed. The consumer may then receive multiple quotes within minutes of submitting his job request and can review merchant ratings and reviews before accepting a quote and appointing a service provider. The number of quotes and the amount may differ according to different categories – given that each service sector is different.
Payment on PageAdvisor will be made in-app by credit card or debit card upon confirmation of a job – this will do away with the need for cash or cheque payments to be made after the completion of the job.
As well, customers are also well protected against unscrupulous merchants, and can thus ensure that they are receiving high quality services – thanks to PageAdvisor’s 100 per cent Money Back Guarantee programme – which promises to give customers a total and complete refund, if the merchant has done an unsatisfactory job – as deemed by Page Advisor.
Added Lim, “Moreover, with so many different types of merchants bidding for their jobs within each category, customers can also choose whether they want to pay the lowest prices or to pay premium prices for premium services – depending on what they want.”
The PageAdvisor consumer’s mobile app in its full glory.
PageAdvisor will benefit merchants in several ways
Besides the consumers, the merchants i.e. the business owners will also be able to benefit in several ways as well. Explained Lim, “We do the marketing for the merchants and grow their user base. At the same time, we charge them absolutely nothing to register for PageAdvisor and nothing to bid for jobs. We only take a very small platform fee from every sale.” This platform fee is about 10 per cent.
“This model enables sole entrepreneurs who have specific skills like personal trainer or piano tuner to generate extra income with zero marketing cost. In the older days, it required money to put an ad into the Yellow Pages or to use the Classified section of the newspaper. But no money is needed with PageAdvisor. Moreover, you have willing customers who need your service and what’s more, they can even tell you the date and time they need your service and even their budget – and you can decide whether to bid for the job,” Lim added.
Said board advisor Singh, “PageAdvisor will make a difference to the way that the small and medium sized service providers operate. It has the potential to help them access a new demographic of consumers and will be beneficial to Singaporean businesses, Singapore’s economy and by extension, Singapore as a whole.”
Henry Hiah, 28, a photographer & videographer with Brasscollectiv, definitely agrees wholeheartedly. He is one of the merchants who had managed to try out the PageAdvisor app during its beta testing phase and he definitely feels that it is a revelation, from a merchant viewpoint.
Said Hiah, “Technically, any merchant can do the bidding and everyone starts out from a fair footing. So I think that it is a great set-up for small businesses like me as we can get a good portion of the market share this way. The app is also very easy to use and the design and layout is very straightforward in terms of bidding for jobs.”
Lim’s PageAdvisor app is set to benefit merchants as well as consumers.
Main differences between PageAdvisor and its competitors
How does Lim feel that PageAdvisor stands out from other such service apps in the market? He explained, “We hand pick our merchants to ensure that they are all of a very high quality, and also offer a personal touch – so that every merchant is assigned an Account Manager that allows us to keep close long-term relationships with the merchants.
“The Account Managers also guide the merchants through the process and check on them constantly – to ensure that every merchant achieves success in this revolutionary platform,” added Lim.
Has been a long time in the works
PageAdvisor has been a very long time in the making too, Lim added. In fact, the entire development process – from the initial idea to the launch event earlier this week – has taken more than two years.
Explained Lim, “While it has been a long time in development for a start-up, we are not here to launch a product quickly. This is a serious business and I believe that we are solving a serious problem that no other organisation in South East Asia has been able to crack thus far. We definitely believe that PageAdvisor will benefit consumers, merchants and us – so it will be a win-win situation for everyone out there.”
“So do give PageAdvisor a shot because you will find that it is a platform that allows you to connect easily with any one of the 100 services that we offer – without going through the hassle of searching or calling up the merchants. We are confident that consumers will find PageAdvisor too great a convenience to use offline acquisitions again. And in fact, I think that customers who use PageAdvisor for the first time, will be pleasantly surprised and they will become consumers for life,” added Lim.
The PageAdvisor Consumer App is currently available in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Android store.
To celebrate the launch, PageAdvisor will also be giving first-time users a rebate of up to $20 on their first transaction through the app – for jobs confirmed by 31 May 2015.
Email here to get more information on PageAdvisor.
Click here if you wish to register as a merchant with PageAdvisor merchant.
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