Thursday, November 23, 2006 Toral: Getting serious about e-commerce By Janette Toral Digital Filipino
During the Women in Web, Wireless, and Outsourcing road show that started last Monday, I got the chance to catch up once more with YOSSN.com’s Cannie May, who is in the business of providing payment gateway services.
She just came back from a vacation in her hometown Sorsogon and shared the news about integrating a rural bank there in her site. She is looks forward to enable more institutions.
This means that rural banks can now use payment gateway sites like YOSSN.com to accept remittance payments using credit cards or checks from banks in the United States at lower rates than the traditional ones we see today.
I asked her if she will follow the model of other entities that use pawnshops as channel, and she told me she is reluctant to do this. She said the bank’s traditional verification system is still one of the most reliable in money remittance acceptance.
Women should market more. During this road show, my belief that most women’s way of doing business is very personal and based on relationship was reinforced.
This is the reason women are not your typical marketers. They require a certain comfort level, confidence, permission or encouragement before you can see them go ahead and shamelessly promote themselves. Once that is given, you can see women entrepreneurs unleash their wares with style.
For instance, Abby Lim of VirraMall.com was at first reluctant to sell her website during the road show. However, after her talk, she found out that most IT professionals are having a hard time finding computer accessories at affordable prices. As a result, she found herself suddenly selling items in areas we visited.
Get the customers in the comfort zone. Stephanie Caragos of Syntactics shared how she finalizes an outsourcing agreement with customers. She ensures that non-disclosure, non-competitive arbitration and survival terms are included in the agreement so that the client will sleep better at night.
She hesitates about getting projects if the outsourcer is not involved. Based on her experience, disappointments happen and having these provisions in the contract assures the determination of the service provider to fulfill his or her part.
The SEO Community. For the past three days, I got the chance to meet and expose myself to a growing community that is sprouting not only in Metro Manila but also in Cagayan De Oro, Davao, Cebu and Manila. This is the search engine optimizers (SEO) community.
In Cagayan De Oro alone, there are nearly 50 SEO professionals in the area. Some of them have companies while most are freelancers. As Aileen Apolo of Google.com joined our road show, gettogethers among SEO professionals suddenly took place.
I just heard from Frederick Amores about the formation of a new group called, Global Cebu, headed by lawyer Magdalena Lepiten. It intends to promote the use of free and open source software in Cebu.
