Review a local e-commerce sites

Mudah.my is a simple idea: buy and sell in Malaysia. On Mudah.my, you can post ads for free. You can search entire Malaysia for classified advertisements from private individuals and professionals, which includes cars, property, employment, pieces of furniture, electronics or others.Buyer can conveniently buy and sell on Mudah.my anytime anywhere.Selling Property, Car, Mobile Phone, Computer or just about anything else is now easier than ever. Find anything you are looking for on Mudah.my. Mudah.my is a brainchild of 701Search Sdn Bhd, a joint venture between Singapore Press Holdings and Schibsted ASA.

Below Was a video clip which intro of Mudah.com in youtube

Below was the front page which taken at (05 feb 2009)

Service Provided

1. Realtime Account
   InquiryKeep track of your financial status anytime, anywhere with PBeBank.com. You can view your latest account balance, account details, and account transaction history online.
   
   
2. Payment History
   Keep track of your past online payments as far back as 6 months at PBeBank.com and with complete details including date, type, reference number and amount.
   
   
3. Funds Transfers and Payments
   With PBeBank.com, you can conveniently perform funds transfers to any accounts in Public Bank and other local banks. In addition, you can also make credit card and loan payments online.
   
   
4. Online Share Trading
   
   
5. Free Advertising
   
   

Payment Channel

1. Online Credit Card
   -Visa / Master
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Interbank Transfer / Giro / Bank Counter
   -Maybank
   -Alliance Bank
   
   





3. E-banking Payment
   -Open Bill Payment
   
   
4. Cheque Payment
   
   
5. Cash
   - Bank in to the seller after deal.

E-Government in Malaysia: Its implementation so far and citizen’s adoption strategies.





The Electronic Government initiative in Malaysia was launched to lead the country into the Information Age. It has improved both how the government operates internally as well as how it delivers services to the people of Malaysia. It seeks to improve the convenience, accessibility and quality of interactions with citizens and businesses; simultaneously, it will improve information flows and processes within government to improve the speed and quality of policy development, coordination and enforcement.

The vision of Electronic Government is a vision for government, businesses and citizenry working together for the benefit of Malaysia and all of its citizens. The vision focuses on effectively and efficiently delivering services from the government to the people of Malaysia, enabling the government to become more responsive to the needs of its citizens.

The 7 pilot projects of the Electronic Government Flagship Application are asfollows:

1. Project Monitoring System (SPP II)
   
2. Human Resource ManagementInformation System (HRMIS)


3. Generic Office Environment (GOE)


4. Electronic Procurement (EP)


5. Electronic Services (E-Services)


6. Electronic Labour Exchange (ELX)


7. E-Syariah

The myGovernment Portal (www.gov.my)acts as the one-stop source of Malaysian government information and services for the citizens.

Malaysian e-government successful applications:

1. Government’s drive for e-government services


2. Electronic Labour Exchange has matched 75,000 potential employees with employers since 2005.


3. SMS alert on e-government services


4. online renewal of driving licenses


5. Electronic filing of income tax forms


6. Voter information


7. Employment opportunities

Recent Survey For E-Government In Malaysia

The recent sruvey about E-Government adoption in Malaysia, which has sone by marketing information group TNS, indicated that the E-Government use is growing but at a slow pace. As shown in the study 15% of the Malaysians have used the internet to access online gevernment services in year 2003 compared to 12% in year 2002. In the survey, Malaysia's ranking is 25th out of 32 countries in term of E-Government usage growth. the Malaysian are also concerned the security of doing transations over the internet and this resulted in the low usage of E-Government services. As far as the group age is concerned, the younger of Malaysian who are under 34, are the primary users of E-Government services. Also noted in the study, households with high incomes and higher level of education actively use the E-Government sevices.

The adoption of e-government bring more convenient to Malaysian and people no longer need to walk to the office to pay their tax form and etc, but pay it in the internet. Nowadays, this implementation still not popular among Malaysian but in the future this will be a great benefit for them.

Citizen’s Adoption Strategies:

• Provide websites with multiple language version such as English, Malay, Mandarin and etc. This will be a convenience to the Malaysian who just familiar with one language only.


• Government should increase awareness about E-Government services through TV and radio advertisements, and organising workshops at shopping malls.


• Government should educating and informing the public about the process of using the various services offered by government agencues.


• Government should improve the service quality of e-Government such as quality content provided on the website, increasing the speed of the response to the citizens concerns with problem solving approach.
  

References:

1. http://www.intanbk.intan.my/psimr/articles/Article1%20-%20Full.pdf


2. http://www.american.edu/initeb/ym6974a/egovernment.htm.


3. http://www.mait.com/admin/enews_images/MAIT%20Country%20Intelligence%20eNews96_37.pdf

Things to take note to prevent e-auction fraud when a consumer participating in an e-auction.

An auction is a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bid, taking bids, and then selling the item to the winning bidder. In economic theory, an auction may refer to any mechanism or set of trading rules for exchange.Electronic auctions(e-auctions)are auctions conducted online.Electronic auction fraud is rated as the top cyber-crime taking place today, and is claiming new victims everyday.Fraud can be conducted by sellers as well as buyers or others. There are bid shilling, non-delivery of merchandise, product authenticity, bid shielding, and non-delivery of payment. Those auction is conducted by online.

There are few step to prevent this:

First, Understand as much as you can about how the internet auctions work, what your obligation are as a buyer, and what the seller’s obligations are before you bid.

Then, Watch out for “Advance-fee demand” – you need to look carefully at any seller of goods or services who wants you to send checks or money orders immediately to a post office box, before you receive the goods or services.

Third, Find out what actions the websites takes if a problem occurs and consider insuring the transaction and shipment.

Next, Do not simply disclose your personal data – if you see e-mail messages from someone you do not know that ask you for personal data for examples, credit card number, account number, or password, do not just send the data without knowing more about who is asking.

Fifth, Review the feedback rating for the seller, and use common sense; if the seller has a history of negative feedback, then the participants do not bid with the particular seller.

Lastly, Must ask the seller when delivery can be expected if not specified in the listing, and about warranty, exchange or return of merchandise you find unsatisfactory.

As a conculsion, consumers must be aware when online auction to prevent any losses.

Corporate Blogging: A new marketing communication tool for companies.

A corporate blog is a weblog published and used by an organization to reach its organizational goals. The purposes of blog usage can be grouped in three major fields which are brand building (incl. leadership), customer service (inc. product development) and promotion (incl. sponsorship and advertising). The advantage of blogs is that posts and comments are easy to reach and follow due to centralized hosting and generally structured conversation threads. Currently, all major browsers (including Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer 7) support RSS technology, which enables readers to easily read recent posts without actually visiting the blog, which is very useful for low-volume blogs. There are two types of corporate blogs which are external and internal.

Internal Blogs
An internal blog, generally accessed through the corporation's Intranet, is a weblog that any employee can view. Many blogs are also communal, allowing anyone to post to them. The informal nature of blogs may encourage:

• employee participation
• free discussion of issues
• collective intelligence
• direct communication between various layers of an organization
• a sense of community

Internal blogs may be used in lieu of meetings and e-mail discussions, and can be especially useful when the people involved are in different locations, or have conflicting schedules. Blogs may also allow individuals who otherwise would not have been aware of or invited to participate in a discussion to contribute their expertise.

External Blogs
An external blog is a publicly available weblog where company employees, teams, or spokespersons share their views. It is often used to announce new products and services (or the end of old products), to explain and clarify policies, or to react on public criticism on certain issues. It also allows a window to the company culture and is often treated more informally than traditional press releases, though a corporate blog often tries to accomplish similar goals as press releases do. In some corporate blogs, all posts go through a review before they're posted. Some corporate blogs, but not all, allow comments to be made to the posts.

External corporate blogs, by their very nature, are biased, though they can also offer a more honest and direct view than traditional communication channels. Nevertheless, they remain public relations tools.

Marketers might expect to have product evangelists or influencers among the audience of an external blog. Once they find them, they may treat them like VIPs, asking them for feedback on exclusive previews, product testing, marketing plans, customer services audits, etc.

The business blog can provide additional value by adding a level of credibility that is often unobtainable from a standard corporate site. The informality and increased timeliness of information posted to blogs assists with increasing transparency and accessibility in the corporate image. Business blogs can interact with a target market on a more personal level while building link credibility that can ultimately be tied back to the corporate site.

The key prerequisites for successful corporate blogs are:

• Symmetric communication (include using comments)
• Informal language
• Dialogue with readers which results in creating virtual community, regular postings,
• Integration with other media and other content.
• Clear rules and purpose of publishing (regulations).

Setting-up corporate blog often leads to challenges concerning the coordination of the overall on-line communication as companies use various other tools: corporate web pages, product or event sites and co-branded content via e-media presence.

Here are some challenges of corporate blogging:

1. Most don’t receive a lot of traffic: It is difficult to hit the marketplace as they wish.
2. May require a lot of time: It takes time to set up and update the blogs.
3. Being conversational is unnatural: It is difficult to dictates the voice and spirit of blogs created by employees.
4. As employee bloggers become popular, brands get concerned: Blogger has become more popular than the blog itself.
5. Our employees don’t represent our brand: Some employees may cast the brand name in the wrong way.f. Hard to measure success: There is no specific number or formula to measure the success of a corporate blog.
   

Mobile payment systems in Malaysia: Its potentials and consumers’ adoption strategies.

Mobile payment (M-payments) is new and rapidly-adopting alternative payment method where a consumer can use a mobile phone to pay for wide range of services and digital or hard goods instead of paying with cash, check or credit cards. The goods and the services that can be purchase using this payment method include:

• Music, videos, ring tones, online game subscription or items, wallpapers and other digital goods.
• Transportation fare (bus, subway or train), parking meters and other services
• Books, magazines, tickets and other hard goods

There is definitely a great market opportunity for mobile payment system to implement in Malaysia since almost 88% of the Malaysian population are subscribing to the mobile phone service.

There are few types of mobile transaction can be made:

• Premium SMS transaction
• WAP (mobile web)

Premium SMS transactions are the most common in Malaysia where most of mobile users download their wallpaper, music, ring tones and mobile games by purchasing them through SMS payment. SMS payment requires buyers to send a certain code to certain number to confirm that they want to buy those products.

WAP payment is similar to SMS where buyers are required to select product that they want from the web and a confirmation message will be displayed to them with the details of product before buyer can confirm it.

Maxis and Maybank in Malaysia both provide a simple m-banking service for subscribers (bill payment, balance enquiries, fund transfers), which can also be used to top-up Maxis accounts, download Maxis content and pay for products such as pizzas and movie tickets.

Example of m-payment system that is available in Malaysia is Mobile Money (MM Wallet). Mobile Money is a PIN-based Mobile Payment Solution designed by Mobile Money International Sdn Bhd to address the limitations and bottlenecks created by cash, cheques and credit cards. It allows registered users to pay for goods and services at anytime, anywhere using only a mobile phone coupled with a 6-digit security PIN via SMS.

A shopper must have a savings, current or credit card account with participating banks in order to pay using Mobile Money. It functions like a Credit Card if a shopper applies for a "Pay by Mobile Phone" credit card account (eg: Hong Leong Mobile Credit Card) and it functions as a Debit Card if it is tied to shopper's savings or current account.

In order to encourage consumers to using this m-payment system, few strategies need to be implementing:

1. Educate consumers about mobile payments, how to use and introduce its functions (e.g. bill payment, mobile purchase)
2. Enhance security and confidence to mobile users
3. Collaborate with more banks and companies to widen the ability to pay via mobile at the same time it helps to increased customer’s satisfaction and confidence
   
   

Electronic currency

Electronic Currency (also known as e-money, electronic cash, electronic currency, digital money, digital cash or digital currency) refers to money or scrip which is exchanged only electronically. Electronic currency also can be defined as monetary value, as represented by a claim on the issuer, which is:stored on an electronic device, issued on receipt of funds and, accepted as a means of payment by persons other than the issuer.

Electronic money is therefore a prepaid means of payment, that can be used to make payments to multiple persons, where the persons are distinct legal or natural entities. It can be card based or account based and used entirely online.

While electronic money has been an interesting problem for cryptography (see for example the work of David Chaum and Markus Jakobsson), to date, use of digital cash has been relatively low-scale. One rare success has been Hong Kong's Octopus card system, which started as a transit payment system and has grown into a widely used electronic cash system. Singapore also has an electronic money implementation for its public transportation system (commuter trains, bus, etc), which is very similar to Hong Kong's Octopus card and based on the same type of card (FeliCa). There are also one implementation is in the Netherlands, known as Chipknip.

Advantages

Banks offer many services to the customer that transfer funds, contribute to their retirement plans and offer a variety of other services without having to handle physical cash or checks. Customers do not have to wait in lines and this provides a lower-hassle environment.

Debit cards and online bill payments allow immediate transfer of funds from an individual's personal account to a business's account without any actual paper transfer of money. This offers a great convenience to many people and businesses alike.

Disadvantages

Although many benefit to electronic currency, there are also many disadvantages. These include fraud, failure of technology, possible tracking of individuals and loss of human interaction.

Fraud over digital cash has been a pressing issue in recent years. Hacking into bank accounts and illegal retrieval of banking records has led to a widespread invasion of privacy and has promoted identity theft.

refrence:
http://www.solarnavigator.net/venture_capital/electronic_money_transfers.htm
https://www.amazines.com/Electronic_Currency_related.html

Credit Card debts: Causes and Prevention

A credit card is part of a system of payments named after the small plastic card issued to users of the system. It is a card entitling its holder to buy goods and services based on the holders promise to pay for these goods and services.The issuer of the card grants a line of credit to the consumer from which the user can borrow money for payment to a merchant or as a cash advance to the user. Due to the reason of the convenience of the credit card, it become so popular among consumers. Consumers can buy things they like without paying cash. but this also become a threat to consumers which is heavy credit card debt.

Credit card debt is an example of unsecured consumer debt, accessed through ISO 7810 plastic credit cards. Debt results when a client of a credit card company purchases an item or service through the card system. Debt accumulates and increases via interest and penalties when the consumer does not pay the company for the money he or she has spent. The results of not paying this debt on time are that the company will charge a late payment penalty and report the late payment to credit rating agencies. Being late on a payment will be charged a penalty. And the penalty itself increases the amount of debt the consumer has.

We would like to tell that when you are too deep in credit card debt, there have such potential which 15% or more of your monthly income is going to pay your credit card bills, you have triggered one of the many warning signs that your credit card debt is out of control. There are other triggers too which are paying the monthly payments on one credit card by taking out a cash advance on another credit card.

Causes of credit card debt:

a. For the new users of using credit card, they maybe getting too excited and they like to buy branded products such as Nikel shoes, LV handbag, Rolex watch and etc without control and planning.

b. Low knowledge for using credit card. Debters alway not alert about the high penalty of the credit card if they not pay back on time. There are really high interest loans in disguise such as Finance charge, Annual fee, Cash advance fee, Late payment fee and etc. These interest loans will make the debt become heavier and heavier.

Prevention:

a. Develop a budget: The first step toward taking control of your spending is to do a realistic assessment of how much money you take in and how much money you spend. Start by listing your income from all sources. Then, writing down all your expenses, even those that seem insignificant, is a helpful way to track your spending patterns, identify necessary expenses, and prioritize the rest.

b. Keep your credit limit low. You should call the credit card issuer and ask him or her to lower your credit limit. A low credit limit will help you resist the urge to splurge.

c. Prefer use cash to pay. When we see the colourful cash pay for the goods, we will be more alert and will automatically ask ourself that am I have spent too much? Through this we can control ourself to buy only the necessary products.

d. Self control and discipline. One of the best practices is to have a direct set up so that able to pay back the full amount each month and use in emergencies. Thus, self control and discipline to keep these cards in wallet and would not overspend.

Reference:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_debt#Credit_card_debt_statistics
3. http://ecommercesite.wordpress.com/2008/06/25/credit-card-debts-causes-and
   prevention/
4. http://www.naturalnews.com/001101.html

The application of pre-paid cash card for consumers.

The application of pre-paid cash card for consumers




What is prepaid cash card??

Prepaid cash cards are plastic cards, which fall under the pay first category of plastic payments.A prepaid cash card looks like a credit or debit card, and gives users the ability to purchase products and services with a card but with a crucial difference which means a person can only spend the balance that has been preloaded onto the card. This means there is no risk of running into debt as it has no credit or overdraft facility Prepaid cash cards can be used to make payment for goods and services and even to withdraw money. Before use, the user needs to load the card with a sum of money. Prepaid cash cards are designed to be used as a safer alternative as compare to cash.

Basically hows this card works??

First of all,load the amount of money you want onto the prepaid cash card. That will be your spending limit.

Once you purchased, the sum will be subtracted from the card balance. You can always pump in more money when the balance runs low by transferring money from your regular checking or savings account.

Application of Prepaid Cash Cards

There are few application such as:

1. Paying bill – Rent, utilities, insurance, car payment, and cell phone bills can be paid instantly.

2.Transfer money – Transferring money to friends and family

3. Shop anywhere as long as the card using is accepted at different retailers

4. Withdrawing cash from an ATM

5. Topping up your mobile phone

6. Buying groceries and petrol

7. Internet shopping including eBay

8. Pay for toll – Use Touch n Go card as an example

The benefit of using prepaid cash card

1. Free balance alerts –Some card providers will inform users on how much cash they have.

2. Remain in control of user money, keep track all of activity online or by phone.

3. Avoid over spending; always know exactly how much money you have to spend. The prepaid card can help protect you from over spending.