Three-year-old PC Home Online Inc (網路家庭) celebrated the opening of its 5,000th virtual store yesterday on its business-to-consumer (B2C) portal at a company event yesterday in Taipei.
The nation’s second-largest e-commerce site now earns more than NT$600 million (US$18.23 million) a month, in sharp contrast to its first month in October 2005 when it made just NT$60,000.
Company chairman Jan Hung-tze (詹宏志) said yesterday that he wants to see monthly revenue top NT$10 billion and virtual stores grow from 5,000 now to 10,000 by the end of next year.
Jan said there are three major e-commerce models: Amazon’s, a large-scale B2C retailer; eBay’s, a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) platform featuring an overwhelming amount of product volume, and Rakuten’s (樂天), a Japanese model that focuses on individual stores.
Rakuten exposes consumers to individual stores before they are exposed to merchandise, so it mimics the experience of actually shopping in a brick-and-mortar world.
“What is unique about Taiwan’s e-commerce environment is that we are the only country in the world that has all three models coexisting happily together. In the US, Amazon and eBay models dominate the market, whereas in Asia, the Rakuten model is appears to be the popular choice,” Jan said.
Despite declining retail figures from traditional channels such as convenience stores, hypermarkets and department stores, Jan cited a recent Market Intelligence Center (資訊市場情報中心) report that said the country’s e-commerce market grew 30 percent from last year and is expected to grow 31 percent next year.
“So right now is the perfect time to embark in this rapidly growing industry,” Jan said.
“PC Home is the ideal platform for small and mid-size business owners to find a new sales channel, and to be exposed to a massive number of customers who would otherwise never appear in front of their store,” he said.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are limited by their brand names, or lack of brand names, he said, and they suffer from a lack of capital, small number of customers, lack of experience, store presence and unpopular locations. But on the Internet, the game is reversed, he said.
“On PC Home, you can be bigger than SOGO or 7-Eleven because the online platform allows you to build a new identity purely catered to your clientele and add value to your clients directly,” he said.
In the last two years, PC Home has offered groundbreaking features to its members, such as 24- hour guaranteed delivery, local convenience store pick-up, Web ATM, personal delivery and online cash credits.
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