With assistance from the South Australian Governments’ s Business Centre and Playford Centre, WebGenie Software has gained a foothold in more than 50 countries in the electronic commerce software area.

Since the release of the company’s first product in January 1996, the company has been developing innovative software designed to simplify Web use for business and consumers.

The company has achieved a high level of success with its Shopping Cart software that has been upgraded recently to include a cybercash interface and the ability to generate a dynamic catalogue from files stored on the website.

Adding to these innovations and attracting the most interest internationally is the feature allowing the software to be language configurable.

“The multi-language versions of Shopping Cart generated immediate success when released for European countries,” WebGenie managing director, Dr. Sivaprasad, said.

For consumers, Shopping Cart represents the opportunity to treat the world wide Web as a personal department store.

It allows consumers to choose all their options before any transaction takes place. In effect they will be able to fill their trolley before travelling to one universal cyber checkout.

With the new language version of Shopping Cart, consumers will be able to access foreign language websites that will immediately reconfigure the language to one of the consumer’s choice.

“This innovation is made for small business because they can now put their whole catalogue on the web,” Dr Prasad said.

“Customers can choose their own language provided the characters of the language can be written on screen.”

For a business wanting to utilise Shopping Cart Professional on-line and set-up a catalogue, at least one person has to be able to speak English as all the commands and menus are originally in English before they can be defaulted to another language.

With 80 per cent of the product sold in the United states, the Australian Trade Commission is assisting WebGenie market overseas and increase its market share in the 50 countries already utilising the product.

The company’s growth reflects that of the IT industry across the globe with approximately 15 per cent growth per month.

“We hope to maintain that level for at least another two to three years,” Dr Prasad said.

Current growth is aided by large corporations such as Compaq, General Electric, Lockheed, Hewlett-Packard Germany and Rheem Australia registering to use WebGenie on the World Wide Web.

According to Dr Prasad, this growth will continue because of the positive response Shopping Cart Professional has received.