Thai firms urged to adapt to e-commerce trend
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Electronic trading to expand as people surf Internet, seminar hears
E-COMMERCE is growing by 20 per cent a year as more people surf the Internet, so local companies should focus more on electronic trading in the domestic and overseas markets, observers say.
To succeed in business, they should diversify or add value to their products and include websites in English that can reach consumers globally, a seminar heard yesterday.
At the “E-Commerce Day” seminar, panellists said more consumers in Thailand and around the world would shop online because that is where they spend their time. Thai businesses need to adjust to this borderless trading.
Pawoot Pongvitayapanu, president of the Thai E-Commerce Association and founder and managing director of Tarad Dot Com, said online trading in Thailand was expected to expand by 20-30 per cent annually. Trading via mobile phone has increased particularly rapidly during the past two years.
Last year, online trading was valued at Bt744 billion, of which about 20 per cent or Bt140 billion was business-to-customers and the rest business-to-business and business-to-government.
The number of people connecting to the Internet by mobile phone has surged in the meantime.
“For Thai enterprises, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, online trading could be an efficient channel to start and grow a business because of lower costs and 24-hour trading,” he said.
To ensure stronger expansion, Thai enterprises should not only focus on the domestic market, but also trade online globally.
Setting up English webpages and gaining English communication skills to respond to inquiries are keys to successful business online, Pawoot added.
According to the association’s statistics, in the first half of this year, 31 million Thais, 200 million Asians and 2.2 billion people worldwide were online.
Songyot Kanthamanon, chief executive officer of ReadyPlanet, an online-marketing company, said the key to trading was communication skills. Local firms should provide webpages in at least Thai and English, plus languages such as Chinese and Burmese, to penetrate the global consumer market.
For trading online, enterprises should differentiate their products and add value to them. Since consumers can easily compare products on the Internet, cyber-merchants need to find their outstanding points or add value to normal goods so that they can compete with other products.
Not only can new entrepreneurs create their own webpage, they can also start up a business by tapping social networks like Facebook, Line and Instagram.
Pongpun Gearaviriyapun, director-general of the Business Development Department, said local merchants could become international traders by using e-commerce. They should start with Asean as a larger market.
In Asean, Singapore has the highest online penetration at 87 per cent of the population.
About 2,000 new online traders register with the department a year. As of July 31, 12,479 webpages were categorised as e-commerce, of which 135 were verified by the department as highly trusted e-commerce websites.
Tourism and hotel-related businesses accounted for 24 per cent of online traders, followed by costume and jewellery businesses at 23 per cent, computer and Internet service businesses at 19.2 per cent, service businesses at 7 per cent on and others at 26.8 per cent.
Varit Noikoed, owner of BanponFishFarm Dot Com, an online trader of goldfish, said he decided to do e-commerce as it could save operating costs.
However, trading online still presents some problems, mainly regarding payment, as most Thais do not yet trust the Internet, as well as transport or delivery, because his product is alive.
The government should develop the logistics system because online traders need to rely on transport, he added.
