Cafe24, a global e-commerce platform, said on Tuesday it opened a 'Cafe24 Pro Community Center' in Dongdaemun, Seoul. The center is a space that provides close, on-site support throughout the process of building and running online stores for prospective founders who want to enter online business.

The Pro Community Center, located at Cafe24's Dongdaemun startup center, will operate as an open space. Visitors can receive guidance from experts to directly experience the premium service 'Cafe24 Pro' and apply it to their businesses immediately. The move aims to expand its previously online-focused support system offline to lower entry barriers for early-stage startups.

The core of the center is 'real-time startup support'. Through on-site experts, visitors can complete the procedures to open an online store at the location. If they have product images, they can use the Cafe24 Pro system to create product detail pages immediately. Entrepreneurs at the early planning stage without images can also experience the same build process using sample data.

Technical and administrative procedures required at the operations stage can also be handled on site. It provides one-on-one guidance for setup processes that prospective founders find difficult, including membership registration and identity verification, domain connections, electronic payment gateway sign-ups and applying design themes. It explained that users can establish a basic online store build environment without separate outsourcing or high-cost work.

It will also provide tailored consulting on key Cafe24 Pro features, including search engine optimisation (SEO), customer relationship management (CRM) marketing and integrations with domestic and overseas marketplaces. Its policy is to help secure competitiveness in the early stage of business by providing guidance across operations, including marketing and logistics.

Cafe24 plans to expand support through the center so that businesses having difficulty operating online can use professional systems to settle into the market quickly.

Cafe24 CEO Jae-seok Lee said, "The Pro Community Center is a base camp that helps online businesses start more sophisticated operations." He added, "We will continue to expand on-site touchpoints centred on Pro services to support the growth of businesses."