MyAyala.com general manager, Bon Moya, said in an interview with Computerworld Philippines that online holiday spending is expected to continue its growth this year as better market knowledge and increasing confidence in online transactions continue to drive adoption.
He adds that MyAyala is already seeing bigger sales volume and higher values as consumers start their Christmas shopping.
'We have posted more than a double growth in terms of sales volume year-on-year. This just shows that more and more Filipinos are really starting to warm up to shopping online,' said Moya.
'Most of the items Filipinos purchase online during the Christmas season are still traditional gifts like gift baskets, ham, lechon, cakes, and gift certificates,' he said.
Gift certificates available for purchase are usually for major local shops such as SM, Rustan's, Mercury Drugstore, Bench Clothing Co., Enchanted Kingdom, and Max's Fried Chicken.
'Several Filipinos also choose to send remittances or donate to charities through MyAyala's services,' said Moya. 'We're expecting to make anywhere between P15-20 million this holiday season.'
In terms payment, most online shoppers still use credit cards in order to pay for their purchases. However, a few ATM payment gateways are starting to pave their way as the choice mode of payment for several Filipinos especially since very few own credit cards.
'We still have to build up that particular mode of payment but as of now, we are seeing good response especially from those who don't own credit cards such as the youth segment,' said Gerry Ditching, managing partner of local online shop FilGifts.com.
According to a survey conducted by research firm ACNielsen, online shopping is catching up among Filipinos especially in the youth market segment.
'Even though the Philippines still lags behind some of its neighbors in the Asia-Pacific region in terms of the number of people transacting online, the local Internet marketplace is alive and well,' says Bing Van Tooren, ACNielsen director for management information systems, in an interview with Computerworld Philippines.
She noted that the Philippines is comparable to Thailand in terms of online shopping behavior, while Korea and Australia have the highest online transaction adoption in Asia-Pacific.
As shown in the ACNielsen survey 'The online consumer and e-commerce in the Philippines,' conducted during the second half of 2004, a growing portion of the country's regular Internet users are online shoppers.
With a total adult population of about 55 million, the Philippines has around 3.5 million Internet users. About 2.4 million access the Internet occasionally, leaving the total number of regular Internet users to a mere 1.1 million.
'The youth market segment makes up 29 percent of the total number of regular Internet users in the country,' Van Tooren notes. Van Tooren added that there were 209,000 online shoppers by the end of 2004. The figure is growing at around 6 percent annually along with a steady growth in online spending among Filipino consumers.
Local online shops expect sales to peak this Christmas season, majority have already prepared for the run.
'We've already built-up our inventory system, reviewed sales from the previous year, hired additional personnel and fine-tuned our back-end support,' Ditching said.
'A huge percentage of our total revenue for the year really depends on our sales during the Christmas season.'
For MyAyala, preparing for the Christmas season means updating merchants available in their Web site, updating the prices of the products, freezing changes as early as November, rolling out promos, stocking up on gift certificates and cash, as well as hiring extra manpower.
'We don't really need to do anything with our back-end support system anymore since it was made to be capable of handling large amounts of data and sales,' said Moya.
He added that the company is now working on a marketing thrust to push MyAyala sales in the U.S. The company conducted a study on the online buying habits of Filipinos there and found that many are still not aware of MyAyala.
'It gave us an indication that there's an even bigger market out there,' Moya said.