Prospects E-commerce in Indonesia

Today, the Internet has become one of the media marketing and sales of cheap, fast and has a large range to penetrate the borders – national borders. Along with the internet boom in the late 1990′s, the rise of various online shops that offer the product through a website designed to be able to conduct transactions online, and was born the term E-commerce. In America, the value of trade transactions are conducted online retail continues to rise. Based on statistics published by the U.S. Census Bureau, the value of online retail transactions in three months (quarter), first in 2008 reached 33 billion USD. This amount is approximately 3.3 percent of the total value of retail trade in the range of those times. When viewed from the percentage, the value of online retail transactions has increased when compared with the end of 2000 which only reached 1 percent of the total value of retail trade.

What about Indonesia? Although I have yet to obtain statistical data on this subject, but the estimated retail value of transactions conducted via the Internet is still a very small amount and percentage when compared with the overall value of retail transactions. This is in line with the small number of Internet users in Indonesia, which according to new data APJII about 8 percent of the population. In addition, Internet users have long used the Internet were not necessarily have to transact through the Internet because the problem has not been convinced of customs or security.

Based on this fact, how about the prospect of E-commerce in Indonesia? I contend that the E-commerce in Indonesia still has potential to grow rapidly. This is supported by several factors, namely:

• Internet access is getting cheaper and faster, which will increase the number of internet users
• Support from the banking sector, which provides internet banking and SMS banking, which will speed the transaction process
• The cost of the increasingly cheap web hosting
• The easy and cheap to build E-commerce sites supported by the availability of a variety of open source software, such as osCommerce, Magento, etc.

In addition to things – things mentioned above, the development of E-commerce in Indonesia would be supported also by the rules and regulations that protect consumers from losses due to fraud, credit card fraud, and various other potential losses. Therefore, consumers can shop online safely and comfortably.