Tiangges Onscreen and Online

Are we maximizing the markets out there? We have tiangges or retail markets when others have warehouse or wholesaling onscreen and online. Are we not losing out?

As of today, I have counted 6 channels solely dedicated to online shopping in my cable provider’s lineup. Although several of these channels are all showing the Home Shopping Network, two local shopping channels are catching up, even doing better if the additional products and improvements are any indication. Even if Valuevision had a headstart, Venta5 of ABC5 sells products much better. Targeting locally made or assembled products with a few stray imports, the channel is very current and buyer-friendly. Gone are the days when the only things you see on the tube are growth hormones, breast enhancers and nose lifters from Chinese speaking countries. But these channels are still in retail. Higher costs jack up the price because of fancy commercials demonstrating the products and the target market is too specific. Mainly limited to housewives with the household products.

Apart from these channels, there are also the channels that use mobile commerce intensively. They feature merchandise sold by individuals, such as personal items from bargain clothes, perfumes, dogs and used cellular phones are uploaded via the internet with the necessary information and flashed on TV. The sellers can be contacted by the given cellphone numbers. There are also channels that show trivia games on TV, and like auctioneers, the personality selling the game can will you to vote in answers so that you get a chance to win money or a hi-tech gadget. A professor once said that these networks don’t pay gaming taxes over these because they justify these as sales of legitimate merchandise, like operator logo, mms messages, or ringtones. Even primetime TV has joined in with guess the title, sale of mobile downloads and other electronic merchandise. Almost all the shows offer some sort of text in craze. Mobile-retail.

TV over internet. Is TV more popular because of the captured audience and the human touch? Like it or not, people are TV scanners and one way or another our attention will have to get to these shopping networks. And buying from their hotlines, we at least get to talk to individuals like in the department store, these agents cater to our every need to the point of bullying us to need their items. But is this why TV is more popular? Maybe it's also the access of more people to TV that causes this.

Tiangge online over wholesaler priced or direct sellers. Why are the smaller boutique style sites of multiply gaining more popularity than direct online markets? If there’s anything, the popular e-commerce growth in the Philippines are not from local websites catered to shopping at manufacturer's prices like amazon, ebay, and the likes. What we have are pseudo tiangges in multiply sites. There are those who sell bags, shoes and accessories just like any other tiangge. We hardly have the manufacturers directly selling online. Actually, they don't have to be big time industrialist, they just have to sell without the jack up of additional costs of advertising, loss of inventory and miscellaneous costs outside of production. It's even better to just have one website to carry all their goods so that each one can maximize on another's customers. And the customers themselves can avoid search costs.

Maybe the problem is lack of capitalization? But we already have ebay.ph, but as a classmate points out, it doesn’t beat the prices from the stores so why bother? And we just risk our credit cards, return policy and warranties. It could be because of the COD and bank draft payment schemes of these small sites or channels. Direct seller websites just cannot do this kind of specialized service, it's an additional cost and effort. People will have to be content then to just risk their neck in meeting unidentified people in eyeballs to exchange goods, than have their financial information stolen.

This is an area that government policy can go into. I think that providing a better payment schemes, IT education and consumer protection will enhance the online markets. This is a good deal for the government, with the revenues that the government can collect with more legitimate businesses who will have to declare taxes. I imagine a bigger business will be a more rewarding collection, unlike the small tiangges online wherein the government will lose more in auditing them for taxes. If these online markets are able to have a foothold in the market and then through economies of scale, a bigger market with no increase in costs, then the prices will have to go down. Ultimately, the bigger the market, the more the price can be competitive. We can say goodbye to retailing which we culturally subsrcibe to and usher in price buster wholesaling or at least direct selling online.