Abstract-Online shopping is getting popular even in the rural areas of developing countries. However, few research has been conducted to identify the factors associated to online shopping by the poor villagers. Whereas people living at the bottom of the economic pyramid (BoP) has an aggregate purchase power which is a huge market and online shopping has the potentiality in reducing BoP penalty by removing unnecessary middlemen from the supply chain. In this research, we have conducted a field survey on 600 households in the western part of rural Bangladesh to find out current status of online shopping use by the BoP people and the demographic and behavioral factors associated with online shopping. Chi-square test of association and multi-variate logistic regression test have been performed to analyze data. Result shows that cell phone use, computer use, social media use, and mobile money transfer use have significant relationship in online shopping use at the BoP community.
Abstract-Most people at the BOP (base of the economic pyramid, the largest but the poorest community in the world comprising 69% of world population) do not have access to ecommerce services. The way e-commerce is designed and practiced today does not enable their participation. The reasons are: their purchasing power is low, they do not have any means to make online payments, and there is no infrastructure to deliver the purchased items to their doors. To enable the participation of the people at BOP, we propose an e-commerce framework by engaging MFI resources and our recently developed ePassbook system. This paper shows how the BOP community can enjoy the benefits of the e-commerce service by using the proposed model. The advantages of making ecommerce available to the BOP are discussed, in addition to the challenges involved in implementing the model.
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