Website gears up for smart-phone trading
The race to develop e-commerce in Thailand is heating up with news that True Corporation plans to introduce mobile-phone based shopping services on its e-commerce website Weloveshopping.com.
Like others in the nascent e-commerce market True Corp's plans are driven by the huge and growing number of mobile Internet users, the development of mobile payment systems and changing consumer behavior.
Weloveshopping.com believes mobile trading is the e-commerce trend to follow in Thailand, according to True Corp's general manager of convergence Web portal business, Monsinee Nakapanant.
She said the website planned to launch mobile services to allow people to conduct consumer-to-consumer (C2C) electronic transactions, to enhance its existing e-commerce platform. It will also offer more services to its online merchants, such as providing e-commerce integration to merchants' back-end systems and developing more market segments.
The overall e-commerce market this year is expected to grow by about 40 per cent, so Weloveshopping.com is aiming for the same growth rate. The e-commerce-market expansion is expected to result from a general growth in Internet-related businesses following the rising number of Internet and mobile Internet users.
"The market is expanding and more players are coming in. This year will see more heavy competition because giant retailers like Central and The Mall plan to come in, and the large competitor - Tarad.com - has been improving its business and platform after getting investment from a Japanese firm. So, we have to adjust our services to handle the coming competition," Monsinee said.
She said two areas of e-commerce were expected to have high growth.
The first is mobile e-commerce, due to the rapid increase in smart-phone adoption and mobile-Internet use. There are currently about 6 million mobile-Internet users in Thailand, or about 10 per cent of the population. This bodes well for mobile-based e-commerce, she said.
Consumers are also changing their behavior. They're staying online longer, or remaining online all the time. They're also tending to buy goods and services online in small amounts, and more often. This leads to new market opportunities for customer-to-customer e-commerce, she said.
Weloveshopping.com plans to offer a mobile e-commerce platform in the third quarter of this year that will allow C2C shoppers to buy and sell goods via smart phones.
Monsinee said individual users will be able to apply to sell products piece by piece on Weloveshopping.com and open mobile-wallet accounts via their mobile phones.
Once they get an online merchant code, they will be able to upload details of their product, including a photo, a short description and a price. The product will be categorised in the mobile marketplace at Weloveshopping.com, which is currently visited by about 180,000 buyers every day.
"Once that product is sold, the seller will get money via their mobile wallet. It will be virtual money provided by True Money. They will then be able to withdraw it from their True Wallet account at an ATM or through a bank account," Monsinee said.
She said the website was not yet ready to offer purchasing via mobile phones. Buyers who visit the website from mobile phones will be able to access product details, but not buy and make payments. These services are in the pipeline.
The Second high-growth area is the existing e-commerce platform, on which the majority of transactions and activities conducted at Weloveshopping.com are expected to change from consumer-to-consumer deals to business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions. More businesses are expected to jump into e-commerce this year as they see the rapid expansion of Internet use and changing consumer behaviour.
"Apart from our existing 200,000 online merchants, we expect to take on increasing numbers of merchants this year who have hitherto been purely offline traders. We will help them to expand into e-commerce," Monsinee said.
Weloveshopping.com will offer the integration of an e-commerce platform with merchants' back-end systems, to facilitate the flow of online transactions from the front end, at online marketplace, to the back-end stock and inventory systems. It will also offer website customisation to suit the type of business of each merchant.
"We will also develop new market segments for new types of products, such as 'Brand' for brand-name products and 'Trend & Design' for trendy and design products. There will be more products and more businesses online this year," Monsinee said.
Moreover, she said Weloveshopping.com would also offer a so-called "WeTrust" system as a guarantee, to help build consumer confidence in e-commerce transactions. Under the WeTrust concept, Weloveshopping.com will hold on to customers' payments for 7 days before sending the money to merchants. If, in that time, the customer complains about the product bought from the website, the money will be refunded.
She said the success factor at Weloveshopping.com was the support of online payments powered by True Money. This provided a wide range of payment channels for people buying online, including mobile payment, ATMs, bank accounts, credit cards, debit cards and True's mobile wallet system.
"We offer total services for e-commerce, supporting both merchants and buyers. That is the key success factor for us," Monsinee said. "Last year, we had online transactions with a total value of around Bt9 billion flow through Weloveshopping.com. This year we expect the value of online transactions to increase by 30 per cent, to around Bt12 billion."