Is Malaysian e-Commerce Scene Catching Up? | Ramblings of an e-trader

Wednesday, 5 July 2006

Is Malaysian e-Commerce Scene Catching Up?

Being involved in e-trading for 1.5 years, I have the good fortune to get to know fellow e-traders. Some are doing this on a small scale basis, utilising ready-made trading platforms like eBay and Lelong, while some really impressed me with their professional webstore, with shopping cart and various payment gateway.

Despite having my own
WebStore for almost a year now, I'm still fascinated with the shopping cart feature.

I personally feel that it is not possible to survive on e-commerce sales alone IF we only cater to the Malaysian market. I know of a few people who are into this full time, and they can manage pretty well financially, but all these people are selling to overseas buyers.

Maybe there are successful sellers who are only selling to Malaysians, especially powersellers in
Lelong, and maybe there are sellers who are successful enough and yet do not wish to go into e-commerce full time. There's always exception to the rule.

I feel that the big money is actually in the foreign currency exchange. This is one of the reasons why sellers are willing to pay listing and final value fees to
eBay to list on eBay's paid sites (for example) - to be exposed to a ready pool of potential buyers from overseas.

To some, even this isn't enough, that's why they pay a few extra bucks to be featured on the front page, for added exposure =)

Sellers are also willing to pay to set up an
eBay Store for the exposure. At least they do not have to do as much marketing as those having a stand-alone WebStore, like me.

I think the downside of having an
eBay Store is the long URL but this can be solved by getting a domain name and redirecting it to the Store. Other than this, Store owners have been telling me that their goods are literally flying off the shelf.

~*~ Happy trading, everybody! ~*~

1 comments:

Dilip Mutum said...

Interesting post.

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