A CYBER shopping product is making real cash for Adelaide
software designer Dr Siva Prasad
His two year-old company WebGenie Software, will generate an estimated
$2 million in global sales this year, selling Shopping Cart and other
online products to customers in more than 50 countries.
Shopping Cart, a simple software program for Web-based businesses
wanting to sell products online, has been developed in six languages and
allows for other languages to be added.
Dr Prasad said the “language configurable,” version had lifted global
sales this year.
“The multi-language versions of Shopping Cart generated immediate
success when released for European countries,” he said.
The small company employs three people to answer technical inquiries
while its products are developed by contract programmers.
WebGenie sells 80 per cent of its products to United States
customers, 10 percent to Europe, 8 per cent elsewhere and only 2 per
cent to Australian customers.
Small business accounts for 40 per cent of sales while larger
WebGenie customers include General Electric, IBM, the US Health
Department, and Yale and Harvard universities.
Formerly a microbiologist, Dr Prasad moved into a lucrative
software career in 1996.
WebGenie is growing at 15 per cent a month – in line with the
increase of people using the Internet.
“We’re not able to sustain that growth but we’ll probably grow at
about 10 per cent a month for the next couple of years,” Dr Prasad said.
“The market is growing so rapidly, perhaps what we ‘re seeing is not
our growth but the growth of the market.”
He hoped WebGenie would grab a 10 per cent share from its tiny hold
on the Shopping Cart software market, moving into European and Asian
markets as those regions adopted e-commerce.
With its large export potential, the company has received financial
help and advice from Business Centre and Austrade to develop its
Overseas markets.
Apart from its shopping cart and language configurable software, Dr
Prasad said WebGenie was also researching a “child-safe” Internet search
engine which blocked adult-only sites on the Web.
By Meredith Booth
