A Survey of the Impact and Challenges of Business to Business (B2b) E-commerce in Kenya: a Case of E-sokoni

Abstract

"Technology is reshaping economies and transforming business and consumers. This is about more than e-commerce, or e-mail, or e-trades. It is about the "e" in the economic opportunity" - William Daley This study investigated the services offered by a B2B e-Market place and explored the impact and challenges faced by member organizations of an e-rnarket as well as the emarket itself. It involved a case study of an e-market in Kenya called E-sokoni. E-sokoni was chosen because it is a developed B2B e-commerce hub with a membership of six buyers and three hundred and eight suppliers as at the time of this study. It has been in operation for over three years since the year 2000. The results obtained portrays that 75% of the supplier members joined E-sokoni to reduce operational costs, 65% to access more customers and 75% to reduce sales and distribution costs. On the side of buyers all the buyers joined E-sokoni to both reduce operational costs and reduce procurement expenses. Services offered by E-sokoni include Electronic market exchange, Business process reengineering, Supply chain management consultancy, Inventory management advisory and Web marketing. Over 60% of the suppliers considered all these services important while all the buyers censidered Electronic market exchange and Business process reengineering significant. Only 6% of suppliers have over 5% of their sales going through E-sokoni while all the buyers have over 20o/~of the purchases coming through E-sokoni. This is attributed to the fact that most of the buyers migrated with their suppliers to E-sokoni hence a higher percentage of purchases coming through E-sokoni for buyers. Generally for the suppliers B2B e-commerce has resulted into reduced supply chain time attributed to delivery of products in time and order processing has improved because of real time exchange of information. For the buyers, joining E-sokoni has resulted into elimination of intermediaries resulting in delivery of purchases in the right time, quantity and quality. Sellers pointed out that staff requires training to enable implementation of B2B ecommerce or otherwise new skilled staff members should be hired whereas buyers pointed out slow connectivity speeds, poor electronic payment systems and poor infrastructure as the main obstacles. Generally it can be concluded that from the case study research carried on members of Esokoni it is evident that B2B e-commerce does create a positive impact to the business performance of the member organizations. Nevertheless there are obstacles which require to be ironed out to reap the full benefits of this new technology of doing business .