Cooperating with competitors
Taiwanese e-retailers are not only canny sellers, but also highly innovative in terms of shipping, with the classic examples being "cooperating with competitors" and offering delivery to and payment at 7-Eleven.
Yahoo!'s Wang Zhiren explains that they were offering convenience-store pickup four years ago, letting consumers pick their orders up any time, day or night, rather than waiting for them to be delivered to their doors. This past January, they expanded this into offering a means to pay for the order at convenience stores as well, offering a one-stop-shop for payment and pickup at any of their nearby convenience stores.
"Shipping and payment are the lifeblood of business, and as soon as we opened up this channel, sales shot through the roof," says Wang. Not long after the service went online, 20% of Yahoo! members were using it regularly.
According to Liu Weilin's analysis, Taiwan's multitudinous convenience stores originally proved an obstacle for aspiring online shopping services, but the success of books.com.tw in using them has created a uniquely Taiwanese shipping model and turned these former competitors into massively beneficial intermediaries in the shopping process.
As Liu says, by picking up and paying for orders at convenience stores, buyers needn't worry about security issues around inputting their credit card details online, nor do they have to worry about paying for something they never get. Sellers, for their part, don't have to worry about the hassle of delivering to buyers' doors and having them not pay. And for the convenience stores, the more orders they handle, the more they can make in service charges.
"A lot of buyers will, when picking up their orders, grab a drink or snack, thus adding to the turnover of the store and creating a win-win-win situation," jokes Liu.
In its 10-year history, online shopping in Taiwan has become a force to be reckoned with. In these poor economic times, the boom in this "at-home economy" has been surprising in its strength, and behind it lie years of hard work and grind by a number of entrepreneurs. Sometimes the hardest of times inspire the greatest creativity and create the biggest opportunities, and in the essentially infinite world of the Internet lies a perfect place to experiment.