Browsing by Author "Sirak, Kalehiwot"

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    The Role Of E-Commerce In Improving Supply Chain: The Case Of Selected Online Retail Shops In Addis Ababa
    (Addis Ababa University, 2020-06) Sirak, Kalehiwot; Bogale, Mengistu (Ph.D)
    E-commerce solutions in supply chain management have often been approached from various dimensions focusing on the overall role on efficiency, customer service and responsiveness. Application of ecommerce solutions has seen improvements in different ecommerce models like Business to Business, Business to Consumers, Consumers to Consumers, and Government to Business ecommerce models. However, many sectors of the service delivery or retail sectors in developing countries didn’t adopt any of the models and this could be attributed to their ineffective and inefficient performance. There exists a research gap on this area of the role of ecommerce application on supply chain performance in list developing countries like Ethiopia. The study employed a descriptive and explanatory research designs. The population comprised of 539 online shops doing business on four selected online retail shop platforms which were 22Bole.com, Qefira.com, Merkatoonline.shop and sholamart.com. Random sampling techniques was applied to choose the respondent for the questionnaire from the population after the selected platform population divided in to the appropriate strata and a proportionate sampling was taken from each to represent all the strata. 230 online shops were found to be the appropriate sample size to match the population size of 539 shops. Descriptive statistics was used to identify the role of ecommerce on supply chain performance and to state other variables. Correlation and Regression analysis approaches were used to investigate the relationships between the variables and the extent to which the independent variables explained supply chain performance. Findings show that there is a significant positive relation between ecommerce application and supply chain performance of the online retail shops. Application of ecommerce found to play significant role in efficiency, responsiveness, flexibility and customer service. Profitability and reliability were not found to be significantly related to the application of ecommerce. Perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use were found to be the triggering factors at higher level for the adoption of ecommerce. Therefore online retail shops and platforms need to invest much more on ecommerce applications to benefit and have better supply chain performance especially in the areas of information flow, material flow and financial flow of the supply chain. The government and other stake holders need to work more on ecommerce development to improve supply chain performances. Finally it is recommended that universities and research institutes to do more detailed researches to assess the status and benefit of ecommerce in many different aspects.