Thursday, August 19, 2004 Toral: Concerns about e-commerce By Janette Toral Digital Filipino
From August 17 to 20, I am conducting an e-commerce success seminar series here in Cebu City.
There was a lot of uncertainty when we were preparing for it. Most registrants came in only last week. Friends were asking why we decided to do this since a lot of people are already discouraged as far as e-commerce is concerned.
Actually, I don’t think that is true. Almost all SMEs (small and medium enterprises) right now have computers, fax, Inter-net connection, and use cellular phones in their personal transactions. These are just some of the basic tools that one uses to do e-commerce.
There are numerous developments in e-commerce that SMEs hardly take advantage of. This is why there’s a great need to push for competency building and realize the possibilities.
E-commerce competency building should not be limited to SMEs but to trade support infrastructures as well, such as associations, academe, and government agencies.
If these trade support organizations don’t possess this, it will influence how ICT (information and communications technology) and e-commerce are adopted and used to the best interest of the organization.
For the past two days, I noted the following concerns that we got from the seminar series:
l Copyright awareness. Most SMEs who outsource services like programming, art work, design, among others, to freelancers or entities don’t realize that unless copyright ownership is asserted, the entity doing the work can take ownership of the copyright.
This is especially true to software development projects where the source code is not provided to the SME who subcontracted the work. By the time the SME realizes it should have it for maintenance and revision
purposes, it is not entitled to it as copyright ownership belongs to the subcontractor.
l Website that works. A lot of SMEs know the importance of having a website in establishing identity. However, the effort that needs to be done to ensure the brand is protected and traffic maximized is something not realized yet.
Domain names are like real estate addresses online. They must be speakable and easy to remember.
Brands and product lines you want to be associated with your product should be registered too. In the case of Pinoy-Delikasi.com, owner Jovel Cipriano has to register product line domain names (like danggit.com) to ensure that no one will challenge his website in terms of branding and identity building.
As a result, majority of his revenue today comes from search engine positioning efforts.
(email: janette@digitalfilipino.com.)
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