“I like to shop for clothes online because no sales girls will pester me,” said Cecelia Wang, a 23-year-old university student in Taipei who said she spent about 1,500 Taiwan dollars, about $43, each month on Internet purchases. “For online shopping, all I need to do is sit in my room and shop, which is great.”

Internet retailing is increasingly making its presence felt in Asia because telecommunications infrastructure has improved and payment, a major obstacle to online shopping, is increasingly secure, analysts say.

Internet penetration rates, the percentage of the population that has Internet access, is about 17 percent in Asia versus 73 percent in North America and almost 50 percent in Europe, according to www.internetworldstats.com.

As more people in countries like China and India get hooked up to the Internet, online sales are expected to rise by an average of 20 percent a year. In some markets, including Japan, they are expected to increase by as much as 40 percent annually.

“There is a huge opportunity for retailers in Asia-Pacific to benefit from the cost-savings of operating online,” said Sandra Hanchard, a senior analyst at Hitwise, an “online intelligence service” subsidiary of Experian Group.

“Surfing the Internet is now a mainstream lifestyle activity,” Hanchard said. “More and more traditional retailers are realizing that this is an opportunity to connect directly with consumers.”

Although the global economic downturn has affected both traditional and online retailers, analysts say the gloomy economic outlook is actually encouraging consumers to hunt for second-hand goods online or make greater use of auction and rental Web sites, like www.thatbagiwant.com.

Asia’s technology-savvy online shoppers buy everything from flowers to airline tickets. Online games like mah-jongg are gaining popularity in Taiwan. In Hong Kong and Australia, shoppers are drawn to overseas retailers’ Web sites.

Amazon.com and eBay are among the most popular sites in Asia. On eBay India, which has more than two million registered users, top purchases in 2008 included gemstones, mobile handsets, MP3 players, women’s apparel and Indian stamps and coins, said Deepa Thomas, eBay India’s senior manager of pop culture.

The company’s sales show that despite relatively low Internet penetration, Indians have readily embraced online shopping. “Earlier, people only bought easily affordable items, but now they’re also buying more high-value items and unusual items, as they have more confidence shopping online,” Thomas said.

The market research firm Euromonitor International forecasts that Internet retail sales in the Asia-Pacific region will have doubled in 2012 from 2007, reaching more than $71 billion by 2012.

Asia still lags behind the United States, where Forrester Research says that online spending in 2008 was $141 billion and could reach $156 billion this year.

In the United States, online sales at retailers like Best Buy and Macy’s continue to grow despite the recession and weaker physical store sales.

Hanchard says that online retailing in the Asia-Pacific region has been slow to develop, compared with its use in Europe and the United States, partly because retailers have not put as much money into their online channels.

In Australia, broadband speed and worries about payment security have also acted as deterrents. Improvements in Internet technology and signs that more consumers are shopping online in Asia is encouraging some retailers to take better advantage of online distribution channels.

RR Australia, owner of Radio Rentals, Australia’s largest household appliances rental company, started an online electrical store called Big Brown Box in November, in part because Australians cannot order electronics from Web sites abroad because of differences in voltage and electrical sockets.

“We know that the appetite for consumers’ purchasing online is growing by the day,” said RR Australia’s managing director, John Hughes. “There are many people who are very time-poor, relative to their ability to actually get out there and shop.”

What is interesting, say analysts at KPMG, is that the online retail sales market is expanding in more mature markets, including Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. These are countries that possess some of the world’s most effective communication services and high penetration for broadband Internet access.

In Taiwan, online shopping transactions rose 32.3 percent to 243 billion dollars last year, the Institute for Information Industry said, with most online shoppers buying clothes, accessories, beauty and health products. A Visa e-Commerce Tracking survey of 3,000 Internet users in Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong found that the average amount of spending online in a 12-month period ending in April 2008 was $3,000.

Original News source from IHT

The fire took away our electricity supply, our phone line (thus call + broadband), and lift. The whole place smells like a over-baked Chicken BBQ.

For time being until the supply being resolved (probably takes weeks).

For sales enquiry: Please contact Ethan at +6016 238 6246 or Adrian at +6012 2187588.

Or as usual, get in touch with us via Emails:
Support@neowave.com.my for technical related issues and Sales@neowave.com.my for any sales inquiries. We will get back to you as promptly as possible.

Last but not least, all of us are still in one piece. So business as usual. As all team members are equipped with at least a laptop, they are now dispatched and now working in Mobile + SOHO mode.

As you can see, as we are internet based, such incident won’t have major impact on us. But those running retail is not as lucky as us, they are location-based and tied to all the stuff at their stores to run. Out of electricity + communication is a curse to them!

The good thing about doing an online business is, even if you migrate out of country, you can still sell stuffs from your website. So don’t wait, start off an e-commerce business now with webShaper.

burn baby, burn!

closer look, all wires are now officially turned into ashes.

poor lifts just beside also “painted black”

a scene of the disaster.

Below is a brief recap on the missing “2 month trails”.

–> After almost one year of hard work – We successfully deliver 2 enterprise class e-commerce projects – Big clients with well-recognized brands- AirAsia’s Redmegastore (Buy Tony Fernandez Famous Baseball Red Cap here!) and Telekom Malaysia TM Rewards eStore (The only place you can get iTalk with bonus credit!). Successfully pulling it off means a great deal to a small company like us as it says something about our capability, our product and our luck!

TM Rewards Online Store

The only place you can buy italk with special bonus

AirAsia RedMegaStore

AirAsia made flights possible for the masses – buy AirAsia merchandize to inspire you!

Updates: See more below:
Buy Air Asia merchandise online
http://www.thesundaily.com/article.cfm?id=29137

AirAsia and Travel-Zone testimonials uploaded
http://www.neowave.com.my/webshaper_ecommerce_testimonial.asp

–> New webShaper shopping cart engine v2.5 is being rolled out and undergo heavy testing now. It comes with tons of new exciting features like “Share product on Facebook” (think social marketing!), Customers Review & Rating (think user generated contents), even better SEO with improved automated keyword placement, enhanced security against SQL injection and more!

–> Working very hard on development of new  hosted shopping cart service aka Software As a Service – Sign up now for pre-launch offer!

–> More new beautifully designed e-commece templates being introduced! More in the pipelines! So clients don’t need to spend a fortune on putting up a nice ecommerce site that sells!

–> Google Adwords Beginner Guide we share on slideshare.net have had more than 3,300 views! not too bad considering posting was about 3 months time only.

I think you might well aware that for the last few months of 2008 we’ve seen lots of fiasco in the financial industry causing the word economic to go haywire.

We believe the only way to thrive is to innovate out of this slump, so you can in better position to reap rewards when turnaround happened (don’t ask, nobody knows when). We think it has never been a better time for business to venture into e-commerce. Don’t run e-commerce yet? Here’s Top 10 reasons why you should venture into e-commerce now!

We just bought a new dell laptop recently, we make a request for Windows XP PRO installation and Dell insider sales rep told us the machine “must ship” with windows vista (W T F ? hello, are you listening to the customers? ). If we want Windows XP bundled, the only choice is Dell Latitude Machines, hell… i might as well get an IBM X-61 then.

None of my friends (to be fair, mostly techies) has good things to say about Vista, coz it a hog on machine resources, it’s slow… very slow… i know they have nice interface, but again, aero interface is useless if it gets in the way of completing the tasks faster. My sister got a dell desktop at home and i’m suffering big time using vista (even with 2GB of ram) until i completely turn off they eye goodies then the thing starting to get “usable” again.

Heck, we are going to install ubuntu if necessary.

oh ya btw, if your co-worker is slacking, you can use effective “threat” below to keep things moving.

We will resume work on 11th February 2008. Happy New Year and Gong Xi Fatt Choy to you!

We are hiring! Neowave, a friendly software company which develops its own shopping cart software and e-catalogue softwares, is looking for energetic and enthusiastic webling (software developer, web designer, SEO expert etc etc) that can thrive in a fast-paced software business. Are you the one?

# Software Developer – Ecommerce
Location: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Full Time.

# Web Designer
Location: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Full Time

# Internship or Industrial Training
Location: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

If you share our dream, click here to apply.

Since when the last time you heard of a government website suspended by a private limited company?

Here you are.. as of 10.00am 8th May 2007 – welcome to official website of http://www.tourismpenang.gov.my/

Click the picture for the larger screen shot.

What’s Verisign’s “verdict” to increase the price?

1) Increasingly heavy usage on the domain name server query system – a whopping 30 billion query per day at time of writing.
2) Higher maintenance cost for security to defend cyber attacks

http://www.verisign.com/press_releases/pr/page_041054.html

Look at the bright side, they seem to have a pretty solid reason to increase the price. And mostly your web hosting companies which resell the domain won’t increase their price, since domain is only an entry level products to up-sell more lucrative services like email and web hosting. Now do you understand why we mention it won’t affect most of us, at least not yet?