Well, China has 100+ Groupon clones and Malaysia is picking up as well on its own scale. Group buying sites are popping out lately in Malaysia. It's a bit of deja-vu like many were attempting to build a local social network site some years back...
It was the first time in history that a Malaysian company made headlines at TechCrunch last December. Friendster, the granddaddy of social networks has been acquired by MOL Global, a Malaysian e-commerce (payment) company...
Generally, Malaysians are skeptical or reluctant to shop online due to security concerns among many. We lack smart consumers, as suggested by Danny Foo. Air Asia did a great job in our e-commerce education. Desperately in need of bargain air tickets? Learn how to shop online and brace yourself by entering the credit card numbers...
Do you have the habit of shopping at foreign online store, especially those from the west? I do, like many others, looking for bargains, stuffs that are special or not easily available here. I do have an extra small habit though...
Well, this post is all about charts and figures. Read on to get a glimpse of e-commerce outlook in selected countries of Asia Pacific. Hopefully, you will get a rough idea on those markets that you are not particularly familiar with...
Blogshop seems to be an unique trend booming only in Singapore and Malaysia. Perhaps, many Singaporeans or Malaysians are accustomed to browse and navigate around blogshop but certainly not me (some might agree with me on this)...
Continued from An Observation on Newsprint Circulation...
Newspaper
Yes, I still read newspapers mainly for general news. Sin Chew is on my daily information consumption schedule while I do read The Star on weekends if I have time to burn. Why Sin Chew? Because I think it is quite politically neutral and being a Chinese myself, I would like to get in touch with updates on Chinese community.
Continued from Online News Portal in Malaysia...
After looking at the online figures, let's check out some of the selected Peninsular Malaysia statistics from Analysis of Print Media by MSA.
Total newspaper circulation is generally on the rise since 1998. Actual figure for 2008 should have stood higher though if data from Nanyang, Malay Mail and Weekend Mail are included.
According to comScore (via The Edge), the average daily readership for local news portal in March this year was about 2.8 million, 10% of our population. Many believe that online news portal has hit mainstream since the political tsunami in last March. Citizens started to flock into these sites looking for (almost) real time and unfiltered updates. Imagine how popular Twitter would have been in Malaysia then?
Some of those sites (without mass circulations) are still maintaining lot of their audience since then. Malaysiakini's position as no.1 is both surprising and impressive considering that it is on paid-subscription model (for English content).
Allow me for a Che Det-ish posting here:
1. The world population currently stands at 6.77 billion, with 4 billion or 60% of them are from Asia.
2. The world total internet users currently stands at 1.6 billion, with 660 million or 40% of them are from Asia.
3. Asia's internet penetration rate currently stands at 17.4%, the second lowest region after Africa. The world's average is 23.8%.
4. It shows that the Asia's (internet) market is so huge, yet with so much potential and room for growth.
Continued from The State of eCommerce in Malaysia...
There are so many webstores, so many blogshops in Malaysia nowadays, if you notice. You might have got the feeling that most of them are like some sort of isolated islands. They have problem reaching out to the customers, and vice versa.
I have already mentioned that Google (or other search engine) is not a product aggregator, whereas Google Product Search is only available in US market.
How about online shopping directory, like Shoppy, emmagem etc? Technically speaking, these are only aggregating links not products, sort of an online version of yellow pages.
So, what product aggregator? Enter price comparison service.
Has e-commerce really taken off in Malaysia? Difficult to say, I think.
On one hand, so many has bought airline tickets via Air Asia. On another, how many of you have bought something else online? Ask the same question to those not so tech-savvy ones and you will roughly know, it does not reach the critical mass level yet.
However, we cannot deny that there is some sort of growth in the local market, and these factors are pivotal in fulfilling the potential.
How fast things change, Facebook seems to be no.1 in Malaysia already since I last posted 5 months ago (while Friendster was still leading).
Proof? Alexa. Facebook has moved up from no.8 to no.5, whereas Friendster has dropped from top 3 to no.7.
However, Friendster is still leading in terms of web searches. This is probably contributed by heavy searches such as "Friendster layouts" for teens who like to decorate their mini-hompy (pardon my Korean slang here).
