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What is Stopping Local Internet Businesses?By Mark Kimathi You have noticed the advertisements on the walls on pubs, on the pamphlets handed out in churches and obviously in the spam folder of your email account. Where people go marketers tend to follow with their tricks of the trade. With atleast 1.5 million internet users in the country we would expect some significant activity in local internet business. Unfortunately this is not so. A number of things do contribute. The first among them has to do with demographics. Online purchases are done by savvy internet users and not just those that use their email accounts. Kenyans and indeed Africa is becoming increasingly aware of the possibilities online. From hanging out with friends online in MySpace and Hi5 to bidding in Ebay, and purchasing cars from Asia, we are showing budding signs. Already MySpace is becoming a highly niched market place in the U.S. The problem is that the age bracket doing all this is generally under 30 years, mainly college students that do not have much in terms of purchasing power. And apart from ring-tones and other similarly priced products and services you could have a tough time selling online. The second reason has to do with payment systems. Our local banks have made us to be stuck with paper money which has limitations in transacting online. Legal tender needs to be digitized e.g. credit cards or immobilised e.g. PayPal to smoothen online transactions. Credit cards are a pain to get and so far the more accessible ATM cards do not have an online payment system deployed. On the other hand reputed online payment systems like PayPal and StormPay for some reasons have not made it into the country. And so far there are no local equal alternatives. The number of solutions using mobile phones as a payment system point to this need. But mobile phones are not exactly up to the job. For small ticket items like ring-tones and subscription fees below Ksh 100, phones are okay. But chances that you will load your mobile phone with Ksh 3,000, so that you can be able to pay for a flower delivery to your better half, are unlikely. This means that anyone that is willing to purchase online could easily be discouraged by lack of means of payment. Thirdly and probably a huge barrier for those that deal in hard-goods, is delivery. Let's say for example that someone in Nyeri were to visit your website and order some proprietary detergents you manufacture at your small business, how do you get it to them? The exorbitant prices of local courier services and unplanned and unmarked settlements would make delivery an uphill task. These however are not reasons to despair, but it does imply that you will need to be quite a novel entrepreneur to hack it online locally. About the author The author recommends an All-in-One Small Online Business solution by SiteSell called SiteBuildIt. For more get a detailed Site Build It review here. |
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