E-commerce in Singapore

by Li Hao

Recently two minor incidents that happened to me made me think about e-commerce in Singapore a lot. The first one: I needed to buy a huge chemistry textbook at the beginning of this semester three weeks ago. The new ones which were sold in NUS co-op is about 70 dollars each. For me, a future mathematics student, buying such a dear chemistry textbook was not a good idea. At first, I decided to photocopy the chapters I needed. Then someone told me that I could buy a secondhand one through IVLE (Integrated Virtual Learning Environment). After I asked several “sellers”, I made a deal with one of them. We settled on a place and a time to meet and also fixed the price of the book. Few days later, I got the nearly new book by paying him only 20 dollars. Another incident is that I was supposed to see the Chinese production this Wednesday, but one of my best friends in China came to Singapore on Tuesday. Since he could only make time to meet me on Wednesday night, I had to give up the Chinese production and send my ticket to others. Whom should I send my ticket to? I asked many friends around me but they either had already had the ticket or did not want to have one. Finally, I broke the silence in the NUS SM2 13^th discussion group and sent my ticket out in less than 15 minutes.

Maybe you think the two stories of mine are so dull and ask me: where’s your point?! My stories can prove that Internet makes information travel fast and the fast information exchange does evolve the way we do shopping. Actually, Amazon, Taobao and so many e-commerce companies have proved it for ten years, so why do I have to show these two incidents of mine? These two incidents noticed me that I had never tried an online trade for my first year in Singapore. The only online trading experience of my friends’ is buying smart phones on the official websites. Since I use Internet almost only for entertainment and getting information about my work in Singapore, I almost forget that I can use Internet to buy stuff and make my life much easier. When I was in China, I always used, for example, Taobao.com to buy stuff. Taobao.com, as a middle man, provides me huge amount of sales information. The goods on Taobao.com are cheaper than the same ones in real market, and many of them cannot be found in real market easily. I think that Singapore needs a local Internet platform for online trading. Maybe many people only consider that Singapore is a small city and commodity exchange can be easily performed, so they think e-commerce is useless. My secondhand textbook experience tells me that it is not true, and there are also many goods that I don’t know where I can buy them such as the fancy stuffs sold in NUS bazaars. The online trading platform can also bring Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia into a whole e-commercial group. I think the online trading can make Singaporean’s life more colorful, and the Singaporean version of Amazon can create a fortune.