- Introduction
This is a brief summary of a method discovered and refined by the team at the Exceptional Insights Group, a distributed research and intelligence firm operating exclusively from the cloud. The method addresses the constraints encountered by the majority of individuals in the global south who would want to engage in an ecommerce based venture.
- What are the constraints to ecommerce in the global south?
The constraints to the proliferation of ecommerce in the global south include a lack of electricity and internet infrastructure among other things. Most people in the global south currently access the internet through cyber cafes or mobile devices.
Access to capital is also a huge constraint in the global south. Most individuals just don’t have the capital to invest in hosting, card compliance, and the other cost we’d normally associate with an ecommerce operation in most legacy western markets/jurisdictions.
- What if anything can be done to mitigate these constraints?
These constraints could be mitigated by a change of paradigm relative to that now standard in the more industrialised markets/jurisdictions.
- What exactly is meant by a change of paradigm?
Well, in the industrialised world one will observe the standard paradigm at play. Where you have this distinction between marketing channels and one’s ecommerce vehicle. For example one may have a blog or social media channel that drives traffic to a website where ecommerce sales are carried out. The website has to be complaint with all the credit card payments standards etc, etc.
Well what if we were to do away with those distinctions? What if we got rid of the credit card payment infrastructure and employed cryptographic token payment infrastructure instead?
Well then we’d have an ecommerce paradigm suitable to the situation that exists in the largely non-industrialised markets of the global south. It’s not rocket science to be honest.
- Conclusion
So if we change the standard ecommerce paradigm, eliminate most of the cost of ecommerce, by doing away with cost like hosting, compliance, etc, and thus enabling market participants in the global south to get a foot on the development ladder through ecommerce, we’d a perfect fit.
We’ll be publishing a few examples using free platforms like medium, blogger, tumbler, etc. in the weeks ahead. So stay tuned. For those who don’t get it, who perhaps have a preference for established paradigms, I don’t know what to say, perhaps you’d be better off sticking with what you know.
Attribution: This content was originally published on the 24th of February, 2017. https://medium.com/@mikehydes/a-low-cost-model-for-implementing-ecommerce-in-the-global-south-7da71cdfdbec