Globalisation in
the social form is a social movement in which there is the commercialisation of
cultures. By commercialisation it means a commerce specifically for profitable
and financial gain. (CAPE Caribbean Studies, 2013). According to techtarget.com (2016), e-commerce (electronic commerce or
EC) is the buying and selling of goods and services, or the transmitting of
funds or data, over an electronic network, primarily the internet. Online
shopping has been growing over the last 10 years in the world but in Jamaica,
it has been slowly emerging over the last 5 years.

There
are different architectural structures of e-commerce such as: Business to
Business (B2B), Business to Consumer (B2C), Business to Government (B2G),
Business to Economy (B2E), Customer to Consumer (C2C), Government to Business
(G2B), Government to Consumer (G2C), Government to Government (G2G) and Peer to
Peer (P2P) (Nemat, 2011). However this research is focused on:

Business to Customer (B2B)

This
describes businesses supplying end customers with products and/or services.

Peer to Peer (  P2P)

This
describes business transactions whereby two individuals interact directly with
each other without the use of a third party or without the use of a company of
business selling a product or service.

According
to an article by Alemayehu Molla and Richard Heeks in 2007, the internet use in
developing countries were relatively low however, the rate of internet growth
has been increasingly high. It was estimated that in the early 2000’s, internet
usage amongst the population of the developing countries, one such as Jamaica,
grew by more than 300% to approximately 400 million. In regards to e–commerce
it means that the uptake is difficult to measure because the data is basically
non-existent.

In
regards to the same article by Miss. Molla and M. Heeks, a research was done to
examine the benefits of e commerce of businesses in South Africa. According to
the research results, the potential benefits acquired from literature in
e-commerce and its development are as follows:

·        
Improved
market efficiency (dependency on excess supply chains and intermediaries to
market their products and to purchase)

·        
Improved
operational efficiency (reduce the costs of intra-firm coordination)

·        
Market
access (businesses to overcome informational barriers by increasing the speed,
richness, volume of information flows between a given enterprise and other
market factors) 

·        
Linkage
(ability to link with and integrate into global supply chains increases).

However, in comparing the
researched benefits of e–commerce to businesses in developing countries to the
literature found, the results were that majority of the businesses have not
attained the benefits of those in the literature.

            As it regards to an article published Novemebr 13, 2017
by Ajeet Khurana of The Balance, ‘e-commerce is the holy grail of retail’. According
to the article, the benefits that e-commerce have for businesses as opposed to
traditional retail are:

It provides the business
with worldwide potential customers as they are not limited to a specific
geographical location – the business is accessible to everyone once there is
internet

It provides new customers
due to search engine visibility – it is driven by branding and relationships as
well as traffic from search engines

It is relatively
inexpensive in terms of advertising and marketing, personnel (the number of
employees required to run the business decreases) and real estate (do not
necessarily need a physical location)

It is a 24/7/365 business
thus increasing the number of orders received and more convenient to customers