An evaluation of e-commerce application by microfinance institutions in Kenya

Abstract

The practice of electronic commerce (e-commerce) has been in existence since 1965 when consumers were able to withdraw money from Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) and make purchases using point of sale terminals and credit cards (Senn, 2000). This was followed by systems that crossed organizational boundaries and enable organizations to exchange information and conduct business electronically. Such systems were commonly known as inter-organizational systems. Until the widespread deployment of Internetbased technologies in the early 1990s, enterprises that conducted ecommerce used almost exclusively a closed and standardized form of computer-to-computer communication known as electronic data interchange (EDI). In fact, the term “electronic commerce” was virtually synonymous with EDI (Fellenstein and Wood, 2000; Senn, 2000). e-commerce, however, has come to attract the interest of many following the commercialization of the Internet and especially the advancement of the World Wide Web and its business applications