Why e-Commerce in RP crawls like a turtle?

Last week, I was invited to attend and be one of the reactors in the Philippine e-Commerce Forum 2008 organized by the Philippine Internet Commerce Society, Department of Trade and Industry and the Commission on Information and Communications Technology. The forum was a multi-sectoral effort to assess the status of electronic commerce in the country and suggest ways to improve its growth both in policy, infrastructure, security and privacy aspects. As a consumer and tech blogger, I shared some of my personal observations to the group: First, something needs to be done with the One Price Tag Law. It was supposed to protect consumers from being offered two different price tags – one for cash and another one for credit card, which is slightly higher. When the law came into effect, most stores complied. However, the "one" price tag they used instead was the one for the credit card. They then, just tell customers that they'll offer "discounts" for cash purchases. Pretty sneaky, isn't it? At the end of the day, the problem hasn't actually been solved. Same masked monster, just a different costume. Second, the essence of e-Commerce is that goods and services should be cheaper due to savings from usual overhead shouldered by merchants when running brick-and-mortar stores. This economic benefit is not realized in our case. Most of the time, goods bought online are even more expensive than getting them from the store or the mall. Add that to my point #1 where using a credit card is more expensive and credit cards are the most common form of payment online. Third and most important, we still have a long way to go in the Consumer Rights department. IMO, consumer rights do not exist in the Philippines. Where else can you see those "No Return, No Exchange Policy" notices? People become wary with every purchase they make and nature of faceless online transactions only widens the gap. There must be a certain level of trust and assurance that transactions done online are carried out fairly and transparently. Consumers should also be educated that any credit card transaction they make can be disputed and protected to give them some degree of confidence. All the issues I pointed out are basic factors affecting a healthy ecommerce ecosystem. Unless they are addressed, that ecosystem will never flourish as fast as we all wanted it to be. The Philippines may only have just over 3 million credit card users, but there are more than 40 million mobile phone users; and we know that mobile users now have the capability to remit or make payments via mobile phones. So, the potential market for e-commerce (including m-commerce which is a subset) is actually huge. That doesn't even count the 8 million or so OFWs who are already very familiar with e-commerce. The saturation point will only be achieved if the fundamentals are sound and the underlying economics are favourable to transact online. Only then will we see the growth of e-Commerce in the Philippines be at par with the rest of our neighbouring Asian countries. - Abe Olandres/YugaTech