BUT ROMANO also stresses the importance of advertising and promotions, since potential clients should first know that a particular website exists, and how to access it. When he launched Divisoria.com, Romano made sure he had advertising support in the form of a banner ad on Inquirer.net, which, he says, remains the “most cost-efficient and fastest medium to generate awareness (about products and services) among overseas Filipinos.”

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Island Rose’s Andaya, for his part, believes that having a solid business model, a clear value proposition, and good customer service can only help an online business thrive. “To make e-commerce viable,” he says, “all we need is more entrepreneurial spirit. We already have everything we need.”

Such entrepreneurial drive is actually at play in many personal sites and blogs hosted in social networking services as Multiply where users are selling and buying items among their network of contacts. Yehey!’s de los Reyes says this is the beauty of the Internet at work — and proof that anyone, however small, can go head to head with big companies online. He even says individual entrepreneurs and SMEs have an edge because they can easily adapt to new technologies. There's also no big capital needed, unlike having an actual store. “The secret,” says de los Reyes, “is in finding a niche, a product that is not competing with another store or brand.”

Romano can only agree. He says the best tasting sans rival, the famous siomai along McKinley — products people hear only by word-of-mouth — can now be widely distributed through the Net. His site, he shares, gets frequent requests for the most peculiar of Pinoy items like a kudkuran ng niyog (traditional coconut grater), panghulma ng polvoron (mold for powdered milk candy), and a local brand of women's underwear.

But security is still an issue, especially if one's online store is targeting overseas clients. In 2003, fraudulent credit-card transactions by members of a Filipino community website were uncovered after the access point was traced to an Internet service provider in the Philippines. This led to the arrest and filing of cases against three individuals.

That is why among Toral's to-do list include batting for an efficient cybercrime program. This entails providing law enforcement agencies with a regular allocation in their budgets so these could help citizens and merchants in combating fraud and cybercrime.

For Tolentino though, security is not a major stumbling block. “Yes, you need more secure tools, and laws, but even without those, people were not discouraged from engaging in e-commerce.”

She says what is key is educating everyone about e-commerce. And it surely won't just be about security measures, but on the whole issue of conducting business online.