Ecommerce Blog: Sell More Online
Interesting report, an even more interesting quote
“Smaller developing countries in the region, such as Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia, are also on track to become viable e-commerce economies.”
So do we finally see the dawn of e-commerce? Read the rest of this entry »
Have you even wondered what “sells” online?
Imagine a tool that can give you some insight (just some, but at least better than nothing) into what people are buying and selling online, this would be killer feature, right?
So Google checkout team has built Google Checkout Trends , which aggregates the sales data of Google Checkout merchants (attention, only google checkout merchants, this doesn’t take merchants who use Paypal, Bill Me Later and other means in account) and charts it in a matter of seconds showing you what’s “hot”, and what’s “not”.
So if you’re curious in how sales of Apple ipod or Microsoft Zune compare, just visit Checkout Trends for a glimpse into online shopping.
Tips – you want a better tool which can give you a better picture on what’s sought-after items? then you should checkout ebay’s seller central on what’s HOT: They have a list of free (Ebay Pulse) and paid (marketplace research) information which will give you a good kickstart
Heard of paylink? they are the new payment guy in town, the mother company of Paylink is actually a taiwan-based company called SunTech Co. Ltd. (their website domain is actually http://www.esafe.com.tw, and you can’t find it via Googling their Company name, funny, they need some serious SEO!)
Basically they are targeting those business with a mobile nature, the unique part of their solution is call EzyPay – it has an USB EMV credit card reader (see on your right, the inner part look something like picture below) than can plugged into your PC and hook up to their website and do a Card-Present Transaction! So what they offer is a direct competition with those of big local player like GHL.
An interesting white paper titled Mobile Payment in Asia Pacific by KPMG.
Maxis M-Money, Digi Remit and Mobile Money are mentioned in whitepaper. But wait… something missing in picture, where is mobile wallet?? never mind…
This is how they describe Mobile Money
An interesting twist on the payment gateway model has been provided by Mobile Money International (MMI), a small Malaysian company that focuses on enabling m-transfer functions (limited m-banking or m-wallet services). This is in contrast to the early Korean PG provider focus upon content and downloads – perhaps reflecting the more conservative, less digitally aware make-up of the Malaysian market. MMI’s transaction processing fee is between 1.0 and 1.5 %. in contrast to the existing bank rate of 1.8 to 3.0 %. By 2007, MMI had some 12,000 partner merchants. The largest partner merchant is Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB), Malaysia’s main energy provider, however, the vast majority of the merchants are small.
They are calling a RM 15 million seed-capital company a small company? Hmm… then most bootstrapped startup would be a pico company. Anyway, i think as far as KPMG is concerned, whatever company with turnover less than 1 Billion USD is considered small.
Read more by downloading the pdf file below
Mobile Payment for Asia Pacific – A study by KPMG
We personally think that Mobile Money is a great boon for e-commerce. It assures the merchant that the order is almost fraud-free. Thus it will render our Fraud Alert System (check out this innovative features newly introduced into webShaper e-commerce) useless.
I need to highlight that what Mobile Money is doing is NOT easy, they are trying to change the way people pay for goods and services and their biggest enemy is no other than the Status Quo.
Also adding to the tough challenge is, i think they have a tendency to complicate things – (Tell me what you think after you check through the slides, do you feel like signing up?) In my opinion, if you were to have mass adoption for your products and services, especially in the consumer field, you really need to make your stuff as simple and as no-brainer as possible.
Just like for software, people don’t like to check out documentation and if your stuff just works as they predict, they are happy! (and they think your stuff is good and this is where WOM starting to spread like wild fire) That’s why we are now working on Flash Demo for webShaper! Stay tuned!
Others related news on the Internet
Digi & Citi Malaysia Offer SMS Global Remittance Service
http://www.citigroup.com/citigroup/press/2007/071004a.htm
http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2007/4/13/business/17425951&sec=business
Maxis M-cash in Maybank2u
http://www.maybank2u.com.my/maybank_group/products_services/others/m-money.shtml
http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2007/5/8/business/17656075&sec=business
