Following Ruten.com’s (露天拍賣) announcement that it will start charging 1.5 percent for each successful transaction on its portal from Nov. 1, a number of smaller competitors in the e-commerce sector hope to cash in on a possible exodus of members to other sites.
The Internet portal ihergo (愛合購) — along with other portals that currently do not charge members such as kijiji (奇集集) and Hinet Auction — is one of the beneficiaries.
Ihergo, an e-commerce portal that allows vendors to post merchandise for free and charges no transaction fee, saw its new vendor registration numbers soar to 200 yesterday.
“Normally we have around 100 new vendors a day opening for business on ihergo and the news of Ruten charging a fee must have prompted an increase in membership,” Ariel Chung (鍾依恬), public relations manager at ihergo, said by telephone.
SWEETENER
To attract more new vendors to its portal, ihergo has offered the incentive of a free advertisements program. Individuals switching from Ruten to ihergo will be entitled to NT$1,000 (US$31) in free advertisement on ihergo — the equivalent of a two-week free banner advertisement on the portal’s front page. It currently has 210,000 members and more than 18,000 cyber shops on the portal.
On Thursday, Ruten — the nation’s second-largest online auction portal boasting a listing of more than 19 million items — announced a new fee-charging mechanism.
The portal will charge 1.5 percent, up to a maximum of NT$150, per successful transaction on a single item. The maximum charges for home electronics and audio-visual equipment are capped at NT$30, while there are no charges for the services and real-estate categories.
FREE
It is still free for members to post their items on Ruten and there will be no restriction in terms of number of postings, said the statement from Ruten, created by PC Home Online (網路家庭) and eBay Inc in 2006 to compete with Yahoo-Kimo Inc (雅虎奇摩).
Ruten saw a big growth in terms of item listings over the year as it did not charge members for transactions or postings.
A bulk of its members came from Yahoo-Kimo, which began charging sellers a transaction handling fee — 3 percent of the selling price on top of a listing fee of NT$3 per item — in September 2006.
“Ruten and Yahoo-Kimo are two big players in the market and since both of them are charging a fee now, netizens have no choice but to get used to the fact,” said Liu Chu-hui (劉楚慧), an industry analyst at the Taipei-based Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute (MIC, 產業情報研究所).
To stand out from the competition, an e-commerce site will have to offer better user interface, enhanced services and more a diversified product portfolio, she said.
Despite a possible slowdown in the coming years, Taiwan’s e-commerce market size this year was set to grow 25 percent from last year, MIC said.
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