UDN Group Sets Up e-commerce Website

Backed by its huge resources, the United Daily News Group, Taiwan's largest newspaper conglomerate, has taken a foray into the e-commerce sector with the establishment of its new udn.shopping website on May 24.

The website now hosts 760 vendors offering over 80,000 products, including beauty treatment and cosmetics, clothing, 3C items, books, and sporting goods, in 1,000 categories. Sun Chih-hua, general manager of udn.shopping, predicts that the number of products available on the website will hit 200,000 and that membership will rise to 500,000 by year-end, with sales expected to reach NT$1 billion for the year.

udn.shopping is providing online payment, logistics, and other services comparable to those of other large shopping websites, including home delivery within 24 hours and payment on collection of goods at convenience stores. In addition, it has allied with Groupon, Taiwan's leading group-shopping website, and Lion Travel to offer one-stop online shopping service.

Duncan Wang, chief executive officer of the UDN Group, notes that e-commerce is still in the high-growth stage. He believes that udn.shopping can tap into the huge readership base of udn.com, Taiwan's leading news site, which boasts 6 million browsers a month.

To strengthen its competitiveness against existing shopping sites, udn.shopping has passed ISO27001 information-security certification, assuring that there will be no leakage of the personal information of shoppers.

udn.shopping will team up with the UDN group's news and audio-visual services, enabling readers to enter the website conveniently via hyperlink. It will also develop shopping platforms for tablet PCs and smart phones.

The website includes a CRM (customer relationship management) system which can track details of its members' browsing and shopping behavior. This information will facilitate focus-group marketing, providing consumers with the information they find most interesting.