Toki: From Social Media Groups to a Marketplace Built for How Collectors Actually Operate
They knew the gap. They moved first.
Toki was founded by three executives from GCash — the Philippines' leading mobile payments platform — who were also passionate collectors. Between them they collected sneakers, LEGO, art toys, and trading cards. And like every serious collector in the Philippines, they ran into the same frustrations: finding trustworthy sellers, getting fair prices, and knowing whether a prized item was genuine.
They knew the market well. They knew the technology. And they knew there was no platform in the Philippines built specifically for collectors. So they built one.
The Collector market was ready. The platform wasn’t.
The collectibles market runs on trust. A rare sneaker or a limited-edition LEGO set can be worth thousands of pesos — and fakes, misrepresented conditions, and unreliable sellers are a constant problem. Most collectors in the Philippines were buying and selling through general social media groups, with no protections and no structure.
Toki wanted to fix that with a dedicated marketplace — one built around the collector community, with vetted sellers, authenticated products, and features designed for how collectors actually shop and sell. The categories covered everything serious collectors care about: sneakers, LEGO, art toys, trading cards, and more.
The challenge was speed. The collector community in the Philippines was underserved and ready. Every month without a proper platform was another month of transactions happening informally, with all the risk that brought. Toki needed to get to market fast — without compromising on the experience that would make collectors trust it.
They didn’t need to build everything - just the parts that made them different
Toki's technology partner and systems integrator recommended Arcadier. They needed a platform with strong out-of-the-box marketplace capabilities that could be extended — quickly — to support features that don't exist in standard e-commerce: live auctions, best-offer negotiation, and a seller vetting model built around known collector stores rather than open registration.
Arcadier's API-first architecture was the key. The core marketplace functionality was ready to go. The features that made Toki distinctly a collector platform — the auctions, the offer system, the seller curation — were built on top of Arcadier's APIs by Toki's technology partner. They didn't have to rebuild what Arcadier already did well. They could focus their development effort on what made Toki different.
How Toki got to market fast without compromising on what made it Toki
Vetted Sellers — Trust Built Into the Supply Side
Toki didn't open its marketplace to anyone who wanted to sell. Sellers were vetted — predominantly established, well-known collector stores with a reputation in the Philippine collector community. This was a deliberate choice. In a market where fakes and misrepresentation were common, the quality of the seller base was the foundation of buyer trust.
Starting with approximately 200 vetted sellers meant the marketplace launched with credibility. Buyers knew that listing on Toki meant something — it wasn't just anyone off the street with items to move.
Live Auctions and Best-Offer — Built on Arcadier's APIs
Standard add-to-cart and checkout is not how serious collectors buy rare items. They bid. They negotiate. They make offers and counter-offers. These are behaviours built into collector culture, and a marketplace that ignores them feels wrong to the people it's supposed to serve.
Toki's technology partner built live auction functionality and a best-offer system directly on top of Arcadier's APIs. These weren't features Arcadier provided out of the box — they were custom-built for Toki's specific use case, using the platform's extensible architecture as the foundation. The result was a marketplace that felt native to how collectors operate, not a generic shop with collector items in it.
Philippine Payment Methods — GCash, Maya, QR PH and Visa
Getting payment right in the Philippines means supporting how Filipinos actually pay — not just international card schemes. Toki integrated GCash and Maya (the two dominant digital wallets in the country), QR PH (the national QR payment standard), and Visa cards for broader coverage.
The GCash integration was a natural fit given the founders' background — but more importantly, it meant that the vast majority of Filipino collectors could transact on the platform without friction. Payment was never a reason not to buy.
Category Management for a Multi-Format Collector Market
Collectibles are not a single category. Sneakers have different listing requirements to trading cards. LEGO sets have different condition grades to art toys. Toki needed a platform that could handle the specific custom fields, variants, and metadata that each collector category requires — without turning the listing process into a chore for sellers.
Arcadier's flexible category and custom field architecture handled this cleanly. Each category could be configured with its own fields, filters, and listing requirements — giving sellers the structure they needed and buyers the search and filter experience that made finding specific items fast.
What this means for niche marketplace builders
Toki's numbers — 40% monthly GMV growth, 100,000 users, 100,000 products — are the kind of early results that validate a marketplace model. But what's more instructive than the numbers is how they got there.
They didn't try to build a generic marketplace and hope collectors would use it. They built specifically for collectors — the seller vetting, the auction format, the best-offer system, the category structure. Every decision was made with their specific community in mind. And they got to market fast enough to be first.
That's the combination Arcadier enables. A strong foundation that works out of the box, with an API layer that lets you build the specific features your niche actually needs — without starting from zero. For any operator looking to own a vertical before someone else does, Toki's story is worth paying attention to.
Want to know more about how Toki did it? We can walk you through the implementation — and whether your organisation could take a similar path. Get in touch.
