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DEVELOPING COUNTRIES NETWORKING SYMPOSIUM
JULY 18, 2000
YOKOHAMA, JAPAN

E-COMMERCE SESSION
PAN ASIA NETWORKING
DEVELOPMENT E-COMMERCE EXPERIMENTATION, TRAINING
AND RESEARCH WITH DEVELOPING COUNTRY PARTNERS

WHO WE ARE

1. I am speaking about the e-commerce activities that are carried out under the brand name of "Pan Asia Networking", which is a program of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada.

2. Our main paper, entitled, ASIA'S DEVELOPMENT SECTOR PANS THE INTERNET FOR E-COMMERCE REVENUE will be presented on : 20th July @ 2.00-3.30 session, "E-Commerce and E-Business: Opportunities and Threats in the Global E-Commerce Market Place"

OUR TRACK RECORD

3. Since 1993/4, IDRC's Internet-related activities have been a continuous one of building capacity in:

• ISP establishment

• Internet applications for website development

• Telecentre establishment in rural areas

• Internet networking among like-minded communities involving dynamic and interactive web spaces

• Focused applications - e-commerce and distance education

Our e-commerce partnerships are aimed at educational, research organizations, NGO's, GO's which are ready to market their intellectual and creative products, whether it be goods or services.

4. E-Commerce applications carried out on the PanAsia server are:

• driven by the need of the development sector, to learn how to use ICTs to solve developmental problems; many of our partners see e-commerce as a means of expanding their outreach rather than revenue generation per se

• driven by the continuing thrust of IDRC to network development research organizations in the Asia/Pacific region, as IDRC has been supporting R&D projects in the region since 1975

• driven by an engine that is based on learning, sharing and collaboration in using Internet-based tools

• not enterprise-driven; not profit-driven

• not b-b, not on b-g, but b-c

WHAT WE DO

5. We currently have 16 partners from Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal and Singapore.

6. Our development e-commerce platform emphasises regional partnerships. It places a shop alongside other shops in the region that are selling goods in the same category: Publications, Videotapes, CD-ROMs, Photos, Handicrafts. A customer selects from across shops of different countries in Asia, across categories of goods and checks out in one single check-out point.

7. This kind of cooperative modality and shared platform requires AGREEMENT among partners in many respects:

• what categories of goods take priority over others e.g. a few partners may wish to sell training courses, conferences, memberships, and find that their needs are not met if the platform will not cater for these categories immediately

• what functionalities take priority over others e.g. should we spend time trying to make our program send the customer new title notices in addition to the ordinary "search" button function

• what business terms take precedence over others

• what risks can we each manage as the platform provider, the seller, and what is fair to the buyer

OUR TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER STAGES

8. We run a Research, Experimentation and Training Internet Laboratory where we provide opportunities for developing country organizations to have hands-on experience in ICT tools and media, including e-commerce technologies.

9. We ran a Regional E-Commerce Training Workshop in August 1999 at which 30 partners from the developing countries of Asia learned to set up their shops on the PanAsia e-commerce site. They and new partners create, modify and maintain their shops from their remote sites.

10. We facilitate continuous consultation, learning and discussion in a Web-CT-based electronic classroom space, where we discuss what new features are needed, what innovations are required on existing features for additional programming action for the shared site.

11. We will support a few Regional Internships this year to enable our developing country partners to work at developing and modifying the facilities in our e-commerce platform.

12. We are ready to Transfer Know-How and the Whole Platform or Parts or Adaptations of it to developing countries that are ready to engage in e-commerce-related activities.

WHAT ARE WE LEARNING?

13. Learning comes in many forms for us:

• need to design the e-commerce platform from an integrated system design approach - technical, business model, accounting, legal, marketing - have all to be taken into account at the outset.

• need to set up very user-friendly systems, as partners have to set up and maintain shops from remote locations, and opportunities for face-to-face show-and-tell are limited.

• need to change mind-sets, organizational attitudes, behavior & practices

e.g. an institution must be ready to ship out an item that is ordered within two days alongside with everybody else in the Consortium, instead of asking the Consortium to tell customers that the good will take two weeks to be sent out because there are many local holidays, staff may be ill, on leave, etc.

e.g. a partner must immediately take off goods that have run out of stock

e.g. a partner is afraid of selling digital texts "because texts can be e-mailed as attachments" (so can a printed copy be passed around)

e.g. a partner wants to pay out the same commission to the E-Mall as what it pays to its traditional distributors

e.g. a partner does not realize that they have to market really hard using even traditional channels to sell well on e-commerce

• need to change/augment institutional accounting procedures

e.g. the e-mall can incur bank draft charges over and above the commission that it receives if the sales are low because the sale price per item is too low or the volume of transactions for one shop is low

• need to program for real requirements

e.g. the partners want delivery changes to vary according to weight of items, destinations, special discounts for member countries, developing countries

• need to commit to a legal instrument

e.g. the partners and PanAsia Networking must recognize each other's constraints/expectations or the Agreement is forever at a negotiation stage and never finalized and signed, which means no trading

HOW ARE WE LEARNING?

14. Learning comes not only from doing and participating, but also from understanding causal relationships in the experimental research. Why does one shop do better than another by leaps and bounds? Why do not all shops simultaneously do well? How has one shop fared compared to pre e-commerce and post e-commerce periods? Obviously the volume of sales is not the only measure of satisfaction among our partners. What other measures of achievements should we take?

15. How does the PanAsia experience get extended in the field? We support case study research. Here is one example. Last month, we approved a grant for an NGO in India to do an empirical research project on e-commerce. The NGO will set up an ecommerce platform and recruit "e-marketeers" from unemployed youths in the villages. It will provide training to these e-marketeers, who will champion village products for sale. The field research is to study whether e-commerce activities are sustainable in that area based on this particular model.

WHO ARE LEARNING?

16. The processes and results of all research and experimentation in e-commerce are shared with our partners. On the experimentation side, our partners are the doers as well as the shapers and developers of PanAsia's e-commerce. They are the subjects of our development research as well as the reseachers.

Document(s) 1 of 5