HKTVmall recruits restaurants as temporary self pick-up stations

Hong Kong technology venture's vice chairman and CEO Ricky Wong has announced that HKTVmall will work with restaurants in Hong Kong to roll out more temporary self pick-up stations. The company's number of orders surged a lot recently.

On his personal LinkedIn account, Wong said HKTVmall is looking for restaurants across Hong Kong to become self pick-up points. The restaurants can earn HK$30 per order and HKTVmall guarantees that each restaurant can have at least 75 orders a day.

Wong said there are some requirements. For example, apart from normal spaces that are at room temperature, restaurants must have a fridge that can help keep the items from 0 to 4°C, and a freezer that can keep the items at the space as low as -18°C.

Restaurants need to operate from at least noon to 9pm, and each restaurant needs to have at least one to two employees to be on duty every day, using the order-taking app on an Android smartphone to assist customers in picking up their orders.

According to the South China Morning Post, the company said the scheme was aimed at achieving a win-win situation with the catering industry as HKTVmall is also suffering from an acute shortage of frontline delivery workers to cope with a surge in orders. HKTVmall recorded a daily average of 47,400 orders in January, up 32.8% from a year ago.
The report added that HKTVmall has received more than 100 inquiries from restaurants already, offering more than 200 locations to join the scheme.

The eCommerce company is one of Hong Kong's most popular platform offering online shopping experiences. However, it encountered a data leak incident previously. HKTVmall detected abnormal and suspicious activities in its computer system in early February, admitting that there was unauthorised access to customer information of the shopping platform.

In a statement, HKTVmall said information of a total of 4.38 million registered customers was accessed. Customer information involved in the incident may include registered names of customers' accounts, encrypted and masked login passwords, registered and contact email addresses. Other information that may be accessed by unauthorised people included recipient names, delivery addresses and the phone numbers of those orders made by customers who placed purchase orders between December 2014 to September 2018. If customers have linked their HKTVmall account to Facebook account or Apple ID, unauthorised accessed information may also include the date of birth, registered name and email addresses for their Facebook account and Apple ID.

However, credit card information and order details remained unaffected in this incident. The company said there was no evidence to prove that customer information had been misused nor financial loss had been incurred by customers, it will take responsibility for unauthorised purchases made on HKTVmallrelated to this incident.