Friday, October 5, 2007

E-Commerce Needs Competitive Parcel Service

I think that for E-Commerce to truly thrive in the Philippines, we should have a price and quality competitve postal and parcel service. This is because the entire point of E-Commerce is to minimize unnecessary face-to-face transactions, and have the products delivered on time, in the proper condition and at the lowest freight cost possible. While it is true that we now have an abundance of professional courier and parcel companies (LBC, Air 21, JRS, etc), I think that if PhilPost itself would be able to bring down prices and bring up quality and reliability, we would all be for the better.

Professor Alampay's experience with a prospective book buyer from abroad backing out because of the prohibitive freight cost (I remember Philpost rate at $25 and FedEx at $35 for a book that costs $25) is the best example of why E-Commerce in our country will not really thrive without a cost-efficient delivery system.

From my own experience, I use eBay all the time to buy and import rare trading card sets from the US. As it stands, I'm amazed at the relatively low cost of shipping, for example, 800-900 trading cards, around 1.5kg with the protective packaging, at only $13 via the US Postal Service. On the other hand, if I were to export the same amount of material to the US, it would cost me double, at around $26! Ergo, its cheaper to import than export!

1 comment:

JamesHorncastle said...

Hi,

The service is expected to have a major impact on both customer satisfaction and merchant profitability, It has become the world's largest package delivery company and a leading global provider of specialized transportation and logistics services. Thanks a lot...

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