Rice put up for sale on An Giang province's local platform "San pham An Giang" (sanphamangiang.com). (Photo: VNA) The Vietnam E-Commerce and Digital Economy Agency (VEDA) under theMinistry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) is building the platform, named San Viet (Vietnam floor) to help narrow thee-commerce development gap between provinces and act as a national marketplacefor local products, especially OCOPs (products in the One Commune One ProductProgramme).
San Viet will improve the competitive advantages of local productsand help shape a sound e-commerce sector in the country, said therepresentative.
He also said the platform would be outfitted with marketing toolsthat allow merchants to boost their online sales more easily.
Chairman of the Vietnam E-Commerce Association (VECOM) Nguyen NgocDung believed that the platform could not transform the e-commerce landscapeovernight, given that e-commerce remains a closed book to many OCOP producersin certain provinces.
They do not even know how to sell their products online, let alonemake use of delivery and payment systems, said Dung.
He said a large-sized e-commerce platform in Vietnam, on average,processes 800,000 transactions daily. The figure is just a drop in the bucketfor the country's vast population of 100 million.
He said VECOM would cooperate with local authorities in promotingthe growth of e-commerce in the short term. He called on VEDA to dispatchspecialists to provinces with slow-growing e-commerce to bring them up tospeed.
In fact, the situation is not all doom and gloom. There are plentyof provinces that have managed to put e-commerce to good use, such as Bac Giangprovince. Its local platform, named San24h, has become a vibrant marketplace for its local specialties with dozensof millions of transactions having been processed to date.
Chairman of the Bac Giang provincial People’s Committe Le Anh Duongunderlined the need for technical support to raise awareness of e-commerceamong local farmers. He said the province had aimed to bring all its OCOPs of threestars and above to the national platform in the short term.
Can Tho is another city ahead of the curve with its up-and-runninglocal platform “Cho nong sa Can Tho” (Can Tho agricultural product market).
Deputy Director of Can Tho's Department of Agriculture and RuralDevelopment Tran Thai Nghiem said the national platform would be a big push to “Chonong san Can Tho”, expanding its customer base considerably.
He also said the department was working on a scheme to apply 3Dvirtual exhibitions to all its local agricultural products on the platform.
Le Thanh Dung, Director of TSIM Company, said reasonable pricesand good services hold the key to the success of an e-commerce platform.Large-sized platforms such as Tiki, Shopee, and Lazada are well aware of thatand have launched countless discount programmes to draw in customers./.
VNA
