The business environment is impacted by technology both negatively and positively. To
this extent, therefore, it is only prudent that the business environment adopts technological
platforms, such as e-commerce, but there is a need to ascertain the risks involved, in order
to optimize the benefits.
This study set out to determine the impact of e-commerce on corporate governance in the
retail sector in Zimbabwe. The corporates under investigation were Total Zimbabwe,
Complete Solutions Architects, Venturecom and Kenac. The study included gathering the
views of suppliers, customers, employees, government, and trade as well as investors. It
employed a quantitative research design which involved the ultimate determination of the
regression equation and a qualitative design which used interviews from stakeholder
respondents.
Some of the notable results from the questionnaire indicated poor customer relationship
management on e-commerce platforms, a more stringent control than regulatory
requirements and inadequate monitoring of the behaviour and activity of clients on e-commerce platforms. The investors also felt that the impact of electronic commerce impact
on shareholder activity was not satisfactory especially with regards to meetings, but they
indicated satisfaction with the enhancement of resources with regards to the generation of
organizational profits. The regression equation finally revealed that for overall satisfaction,
as a proxy for good corporate governance, as the dependent factor the statistically
independent factors were investors and government as a trade, which could imply that these
are the definitive stakeholders.
From the interviews, there was indication some of the salient issues about e-commerce that
were indicated included the untrustworthiness of intermediaries, the difficulty in describing
physical goods and the difficulty of eliminating unethical practices on electronic commerce
platforms. Inter-organizational compliance between the organizations and their
stakeholders was also revealed as being a major factor that was needed in order to reduce
the contagion effect. This action was followed by the view that the boards’ responsibilities and roles of the corporate boards needed had to change to manage risk on e-commerce
platforms.
The study concluded by suggesting a longitudinal study of the same topic incorporating
more stakeholders and including more hypotheses to test all the possible and proposed
relationships. More time is also recommended to cater for the fast development of ecommerce
and IT in general / M. Sc. (Computing Science (Information Systems)) / School of Computing
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:unisa/oai:uir.unisa.ac.za:10500/23625 |
| Date | 02 1900 |
| Creators | Rukasha, Memory Leocadia |
| Contributors | Bankole, F. O. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | 1 online resource (xiv, 116 leaves) : illustrations, color graph |
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