Aug 5, 1998

Web Software: it's out of site

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