Philippines unites its forces for common e-commerce infrastructure

It is known long ago that in unity there is strength. It seems that authorities of Philippines also decided to make this reality. According to the head of a data center operator companies that run their own online payment methods may soon integrate efforts to enhance the country's e-commerce infrastructure.

In a GMANews.TV interview, Dr. William T. Torres, president of Mosaic Communications (Mozcom), said that since there is now a critical number of companies with their own online payment methods, "there's reason to say let's do this thing together so that we can complement each other."

"We need to find out who is doing what and integrate our efforts to lower the cost and speed up the process," Torres said during a break at the one-day Philippine E-Commerce Forum held on Thursday in Makati.

Besides emphasizing that establishing an e-commerce system is a very costly undertaking, Torres said at least six online payment methods are currently being used by Philippine companies that sell their goods and/or services through the Internet.

Auction.PH, which allows users to buy and/or sell goods through auctions or outright purchases, offers Escrow. The arrangement temporary holds payment to a seller until the buyer receives the item he or she purchased through the site.

For its part, the Philippine Cut Flower Corporation offers a separate facility for US dollar and Philippine peso transactions from users who order flowers and similar items from its website, according to a company official who spoke during the same forum.

Although other payment systems permit transactions to be undertaken through credit and debit cards, other methods also allow settlements through the short message service of mobile phones.

Torres said five years ago the primary concern of local companies selling their goods through the Internet was where to host their e-commerce systems, which require proprietary software applications.

Now, not only are there a number of data centers in the Philippines, companies even share facilities, which help process electronic transactions.

He said there is a tendency among Philippine businesses on the Internet to build information infrastructure solely for e-commerce, a notion industry players should disabuse themselves of.

"When you speak of infrastructure, you don't create infrastructure industry by industry. You create infrastructure to be used by all of them," he said.

He compared the telecommunications infrastructure to a transportation system. "We don't create a transportation system to only convey people, but to transport cargo as well," he said.