It’s been a while since I last posted here, and it’s mainly due to how crazy busy the last couple of months have been, in both bad and good ways. But throughout these crazy times, I’ve had a chance to muse on this pandemic thing and how it’s going to affect us in the long term. So here’s my sign of life.
First, some context. I’ve recently been taking an Information Technology course for my MBA program, and while it’s a subject I’m well familiar with (if I do say so myself), it was a great opportunity to get insights from people from different industries and how this pandemic has changed the way they work. Particularly for ecommerce, this pandemic has been such a catalyst, and it’s too easy to take for granted how much progress has been made in this industry particularly in the Philippines where I’m from.
As you may know, I’ve dabbled quite a bit in ecommerce services recently, particularly with my startup 80Commerce. This has given me sort of a front row seat into what has been changing in the landscape. Quite obviously, more people are shopping online. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
In my experience, one of the things that has always been a bane to the growth of ecommerce in the Philippines has been the infrastructure, from payment gateways to logistics providers to other services one might need to run a retail business. It was a vicious cycle really – people didn’t want to shop online because of a lack of trust in the infrastructure, and no one wanted to build the infrastructure because no one was really shopping online.
The pandemic disrupted that cycle completely by making it a necessity to do business online. If there’s anything good that came out of this entire situation, it’s that customers have been pushed to try out digital services and service providers have been pushed to find solutions to problems that have always been there.
A few specific examples – I’m quite impressed with some of the fintech solutions that have come out and those that made innovative leaps during the pandemic (not to name names as I don’t want to come out as endorsing them). Payment methods like bank deposits, wire transfers, and e-wallet payments that had to be manually verified are now fully automated – albeit perhaps not as efficiently as we would want, but a good start nonetheless. Similarly, one of the largest logistics providers in the country recently launched a portal on their site which makes it much easier to book and track shipments – something I’ve extensively used throughout the pandemic. Again, nothing super fancy, but a great start.
The COVID-19 pandemic dragging on for more than a year now has truly been a litmus test for the Internet, and it’s been great for driving change and healthy competition in a land that’s mostly for the taking. Now that the vaccine is rolling out and there’s a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, my hope is that this noteworthy progress of digital services we’ve been seeing doesn’t end here.
Dexter is an engineering manager at Synacy, a co-founder of ATeam Business Software Solutions, and founder of TechManagement.Life. He loves to share his experiences and thoughts on managing software teams and running businesses.