The Role Of E-Commerce In Improving Supply Chain: The Case Of Selected Online Retail Shops In Addis Ababa
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Date
2020-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
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.
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Keywords
E-commerce, online retails, supply chain performance