“e-Commerce – a chance you should not miss” was the name of an online conference held 3rd December, organised by the USAID Cooperation for Growth Project, in cooperation with the Belgrade Chamber of Commerce, the E-Commerce Association of Serbia and the Serbian Chamber of Commerce Association of Electronic Communications and Information Society. The seminar was primarily aimed at people from micro-enterprises for whom online commerce via the Internet is an opportunity both to grow and to survive. It brought together prominent experts in the field of e-commerce, and one of the talks was delivered by Predrag Milićević, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer of the Serbian National Internet Domain Name Registry Foundation (RNIDS).
Milićević noted that the pandemic had forced many business people to move into the Internet environment in order to continue doing business, and had steered them towards the seemingly quickest and simplest solutions, which meant the social networks had taken priority of place. However, he stressed, basing one’s online business solely on the social networks brought many dangers with it – the e-seller ran the risk of losing their e-store and thus their customers and their entire business if the network ever shut them down – which could often happen for reasons unclear.
He said that for a successful business you needed the trust of the customer, which was somewhat harder to build in the online world, but he also pointed to some factors which could help traders. Trust could be built by providing all the required information on the seller (tax code, address, owner details) but also by having a permanent Internet address – somewhere that the shop could always be found, that being one’s own domain name.
This was why doing business on one’s own website was important, and Milićević stressed the importance of choosing a domain in accordance with the market one did business in. In addition he stated certain benefits of the .rs domain, such as the greater ease with which data on the company registering the domain could be verified, and gave three options for locking a domain name which would significantly improve the security of any e-store hosted on it. He pointed out that for local searches Google favoured local (national) domains: sites hosted on such domains were given somewhat better positioning in its search results and so anyone doing business in Serbian ought logically to opt for a national domain (.rs or .срб).
Other participants in the workshop were Vidosava Džagić and Marjan Stojanović from the Serbian Chamber of Commerce, Zorana Milidrag and Miloš Radulović, the E-Commerce Association of Serbia, Dragan Dulić, Edukratia, and Biljana Milićević and Ivan Beljić from DHL International.