Strategies for Improving Sme Participation in E-commerce: the Tradern Model of Collaborative E-commerce

The inception of the Internet has brought with it Electronic Commerce (E-Commerce) practices which have greatly transformed the ways firms conduct businesses globally. Internet-based E-Commerce, particularly business-to-business (B2B) holds the key for small businesses to compete on a level playing field with their big business counterparts. Unfortunately, however, there is considerable evidence to show that small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in developing countries, particularly those in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), have not been reaping the benefits of this new commerce as their counterparts in North America and Europe. This chasm has given rise to another form of Digital Divide. One major reason for this problem is the low level of participation in E-Commerce by SMEs in developing countries, particularly those in SSA. In this book, an attempt is made to redress this problem by introducing a new collaborative E-Commerce model called 'TRADERN'.