So plasa.com, the online mall by Telkom Indonesia’s Mojopia arm has had its grand launch tonight. As with many product launches backed by major companies, plasa.com’s launch was televised nationally on Global TV, featuring performances from major Indonesian artists including Gita Gutawa, Maliq & d’Essentials as well as Duo Maia. Filipino singer Christian Bautista was also a guest on the show.

According to a tweet from Andi S. Boediman, its Chief Creative Innovation Officer, traffic to the site jumped five times greater. The company’s business development manager Heriyadi also said that they had to request for greater bandwidth during the televised launch. Of course, for any launch of a widely publicized website, it's expected that the traffic would jump much higher than normal. According to compete.com, the number of unique visitors went from an average of 1000 over the past year to 11 thousand in February in the lead to its launch. Giving away 24 iPads must have helped quite a bit.

Speaking about the traffic, the site really hasn’t had much activity prior to  2009 as Telkom hadn’t been giving their now decade old site much attention but after tonight, Mojopia should prepare for an even greater traffic average as the marketing machines will work overtime to ensure people’s awareness of the site remain high and sustainable.

Since it was taken over by Mojopia, the site has been reworked and repurposed from what used to be an email provider and a community site to an online mall where vendors and businesses are able to rent space to promote and sell their products and services. Rumor has it Telkom poured US$2 million to revitalize the site.

The aim of this venture is to raise internet presence of the small to medium businesses who might otherwise have difficulties in setting up their own ecommerce sites. Some of the retailers who have signed up have actually been in business for a while both online and offline but having presence at this major venture backed by one of the country’s largest companies should help raise their profiles even further.

Heriyadi revealed that while currently the site only deals with physical goods, they plan to eventually support selling digital products and are already planning to extend the reach internationally. Digital products are expected to include domains, web hosting, web design, blog themes, etc.

When it comes to selling digital songs however, Telkomsel, Mojopia’s sister company and the country’s largest mobile service provider, recently launched langitmusik.com, its own online music store for Telkomsel subscribers, and Telkom Indonesia actually already has fulltrek.com which offers something similar. Music tracks from both services are actually copy-protected and at least in the case of langitmusik, non-transferable even from a mobile phone to a computer or vice versa. Seems strange that Telkom Indonesia would operate two music stores and even stranger if they would allow a third.

In launching plasa.com, Indonesia welcomes another entrant in the ecommerce industry. It's local competitor, Tokopedia.com was launched in August 2009 and announced their first billion Rupiah transaction in February, which in US dollars would amount to roughly $100 thousand. We’ll see how long before Plasa reaches the same milestone. Speaking of which, they've waived any transaction fee for 2010.

Will online retailers treat these “malls” like their traditional brick and mortar counterparts? The capital involved is certainly not as high but the competitive platform will likely come in the form of ease of use, practicality, viability of the sites’ presence, and the deals between the retailers and the “malls” as there is no foot or road traffic to rely on, no parking space to deal with, and the internet is missing many of the issues related to a physical shopping center.

While these local "malls" are also facing competition from internationally established sites such as Amazon their lack of localizations, will make it difficult for them to compete in the country. eBay is a competitor that already establishes a local presence but for whatever reason, they are largely invisible to the majority of Indonesians online. 

Mobile commerce is also one that will help define the landscape as many of Indonesia’s internet users are online from their mobile phones, both smartphones and traditional ones. I think we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg here as far as ecommerce in Indonesia is concerned.