KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysians are using their mobile phones to purchase products more often in recent time, says new statements from leading industry figures. “Technology is enabling the market change, with consumers leading it,” said Elias Ghanem, Managing Director, PayPal Southeast Asia and India, in comments published by The Malaysian Insider. “Merchants must adapt to the market change to be competitive. We call this the ‘so-lo-mo-d' — social, local, mobile, digital.” The use of digital technology to purchase goods, says government economist Jeff Retuk, is a sign that the development efforts and boosting of technology is improving the consumer's ability to enter the market easier. “What we are witnessing is a shift that we have seen elsewhere in the world and hopefully this means that more Malaysians will go online to purchase goods,” he told Bikyamasr.com. Rahul Shinghal, Director, PayPal Mobile Asia Pacific, gives a cute example. “I've got a 20-month-old daughter and she sees me using my gadgets, my tablet and mobile. One day, a relative passed her a book and she started swiping the book instead of flipping the pages,” Shinghal said. Tech-savvy consumers are used to reading news, watching videos, playing games and working on mobile devices and, according to a recent GfK Malaysia report, over 4.4 million smartphones were sold in Malaysia in 2011 and about 40 percent of all online shoppers made their purchases on mobile devices last year. According to Ghanem, there are three rules businesses follow when it comes to marketing products: location, location and, yes, location. Shopping or paying bills online is available 24/7, be it at home, office, in transit or wherever there is an Internet connection. Competition is global and in order to drive sales, merchants need a competitive edge to constantly engage the consumer at any time. “Before this, you had to go to Paris to buy a certain perfume. Now, Paris comes to you. Local merchants need to prepare themselves to compete with everyone (on an international level),” said Ghanem about the globalization of online shopping. PayPal conducted a survey from February 22, 2012, to March 5, 2012, with a random sample size of 1,020 consumers, of which 415 had performed mobile commerce before. The study by Nielsen revealed that there was almost RM2 billion PayPal transactions in 2011. For the government, who continues to push development projects across the country, the reports and studies show that Malaysians are quickly getting on the online digital age.
