VietNamNet Bridge – Improving infrastructure, understanding consumers and changing their shopping habits, and building trust among customers were essential for promoting e-commerce, a conference on "Doing Business on the Internet" heard on Thursday.

Tran Huu Linh, deputy director general of the Viet Nam E-Commerce and Information Technology Agency, said Viet Nam had huge untapped potential in e-commerce.

There are 20 million internet users in the country while Government statistics show that almost a third of the 350,000 enterprises have a website and around 10 per cent take part in online markets.

With a website, businesses can provide customers products, services and information in a fast and cheap manner.

Many companies, especially tourism and airlines, routinely do online transactions.

Although the number of businesses with websites is high, most only used them as a tool to advertise their products and had not integrated e-commerce applications, Linh said.

Professor Tran Vu Hoa of New York University, chairman of WorldSoft Corporation said to promote e-commerce, IT and telecom infrastructure, especially broadband, also had to be improved to be able to carry out a large number of online transactions quickly.

Information and network security, building databases for products, designing websites, and standardising payment methods were also important, he said.

However, most Vietnamese businesses did not use enterprise resource planning, or ERP, an enterprise-wide information system for co-ordinating all the resources, information, and activities needed to complete business processes, he added.

Speaking about legal issues related to e-commerce, Linh said the Criminal Law had specific clauses dealing with cyber crimes while the Law on Customer Protection, expected to be passed next year, would provide a clear legal framework to protect a customers and arbitrate disputes.

Besides the poor infrastructure and legal framework, another factor that inhibits e-commerce in Viet Nam is people's shopping habits, according to Hoa.

In the absence of credible protection, customers are wary of revealing their credit card or bank accounts numbers on the internet for fear of hackers.

The country was yet to develop an efficient process to pass information from customers to sellers and from sellers to banks, Hoa added.

Linh said to attract people to e-commerce, Viet Nam needed to have a comprehensive legal system to protect customers, undertake campaigns to boost their confidence in online transactions, standardise websites, and develop reliable payment systems.

Thomas Wanhoff, director of communications at Consulting Vina Company, said business also needed to know what they were selling and what customers wanted so as to develop effective websites.

VietNamNet/Viet Nam News