Similar to most parts of the world, e-commerce in Taiwan had faced the following challenges at that time:
- Maintaining the e-commerce system (software, hardware and infrastructure).
- Staying up-to-date with constant evolution of Internet technologies.
- Integration with financial / payment services.
- Integration with other services such as logistics.
Is the 1 million campaign a success?
Fast forward to 2010, the 1 million campaign has literally failed. According to Hung-Tze Jan, only 20,000 businesses in Taiwan is e-commerce enabled.
However, the campaign can be considered a success from another perspective. There are actually more than a million "businesses" are selling online to date. The difference here is, "businesses" are actually C2C "sellers".
Here's a glance at the statistics before we go further:
- Online business (B2C): around 20K online stores.
- Online seller (C2C generally): more than 1 million professional sellers, not including casual / amateur sellers who are selling one-off and don't restock.
How does C2C in Taiwan become so popular?
In short, the emergence of platform (or technically cloud computing) and the supporting infrastructure.
In recent years, the auction / listing-based C2C in Taiwan has evolved to shop-based platform, like PCHome Online, Rakuten Ichiba et al.
The availability of these platform has helped lower the barrier of entry for sellers to sell online:
- Sellers don't need to have much technical know-how.
- Traffic is brought in by the platform itself.
- Third party services like payment and logistic are conveniently available via the platform.
The competitive nature between the platforms has make it affordable for sellers, at the same time enjoy improving service level by the platform. Heck, this is not only attractive to personal sellers but also to most SMBs.
However, it's not all about platform in Taiwan.
The role of third-party service providers
An important factor of e-commerce growth in Taiwan is contributed by third-party service providers in the area of payment, packaging and logistics.
Taiwan is a service-oriented country, and the efficiency of service related industry can easily be one of the best in the world.
The devil is in the details, and the details of service industry is the knowledge framework. From customer service, support to the delivering guy, they are all supported by instant information. Cloud computing has enabled every endpoints to be so efficient hence help connect the whole e-commerce ecosystem without much hassle.
Since the devil is in the details, let's dive into the details of Taiwan's e-commerce infrastructure soon, and we've got to include 7-11s in the picture too. Stay tuned!
This is second (last) part of key points and thoughts summarized after attending the sharing of Hung-Tze Jan (詹宏志), the PCHome online founder. The first part is about cloud computing and cool power.
