BLANTYRE INTERNATIONAL

UNIVERSITY
Students Name

Registration Number

Lecture

Program
Information Technology

: Bachelors of

Course

: E-Commerce

Year

: 2rd

Semester

: 2rd
Assignment 1

Due Date
31 /8 /2012

INTRODUCTION
To begin with we need to understand what e-commerce is and what m-commerce is. ecommerce
is the buying and selling of products and services by business and consumers over the internet
(dynamic web solutions pvt ltd, 2008) it is now the order of the day that most companies or
people are conducting their business over the internet, a quick example here in Malawi is
Facebook were we have pages like lets do business, in this page people are posting goods and
services that they have and 90% of the products find their way to the right buyer.
M-Commerce is the use of mobile devices to communicate, inform transact and entertain using
text and data via a connection to public and private networks (Abbott, 2012) this technology here
in Malawi involves purchasing air tickets , booking reservations , checking your account balance
and sending money to others via handheld devices .
In this paper we are going to talk about the popularity of electronic commerce and mobilecommerce here in Malawi, we are also going to talk about the past present and future of the two
technologies here in Malawi and which one of the two is becoming more popular than the other.
POPULARITY OF E-COMMERCE AND M-COMMERCE IN MALAWI
E-commerce is being embraced in many countries but its growth remains slow in most African
countries (Mensah, et al., 2005) argue that this is mainly due to the lack of legal frameworks,
inefficient banking and telecommunication systems, absence of security instruments and high
illiteracy levels , in the past the trend of buying and selling of goods and services over the
internet was almost not there ,this was so because most people and business didnt have the
equipment necessary to get online ,most business and individuals translated manually , even
individuals could go as long as china or south Africa to buy their desired products. This was so
because most people thought buying or selling their products online was not secure .But recently
electronic commerce has become the order of the day , individuals and companies have now
understand the benefits of this technology ,since it allows business to buy and sell their products
without the barrier of time and distance (Malawi Muslims , n.d.) This is done simply by logging
on the internet at any time of the day or night, and by mouse click transactions are been done.
The popularity of online commerce is understandable these days , considering the time and
hassle involved in running from store to store , searching for an item .It not only takes valuable
time and energy , but using transportation usually costs money ,but shopping online whenever

the mood strikes even in the middle of the night has many advantages. Not only is it convenient
to shop at a myriad of vendors from the comfort of a computer chair ,its also a snap to find the
deal by allowing certain shopping sites to sift through all of the sellers.
With the coming of internet a lot of things have changed both economically and socially, most
companies worldwide are now taking their business online as one way of reaching out to
potential customers (Malawi Muslims , n.d.) Of late few businesses in Malawi have opened
online shops where they show case and sell their products online. another good example as I
mentioned earlier on is business transaction that are being conducted on Facebook in a page
called lets do business, the number of active members on this page has increased by 80% since
this page started, and to show that e-commerce is really the order of the day, when you open lets
do business you will see that people are buying and selling their goods and services faster than
the normal market.
Most banks like National Bank, MSB, Standard Bank are now involved in internet banking
where their customers check account balances, make funds transfer and payments without
actually going in the bank. In the past this used to be a constraint Malawi didnt have enough
infrastructures, most people didnt have computers and access to the internet, but of late due to
the increase of computers in town and also competition of internet service providers, internet has
become cheap and available in most places.
Unlike E-commerce , M-commerce has evolved through many similar definitions from
conducting commercial transactions via wireless networks and devices (Hu, et al., 2008: 84) to
the exchanges or buying and selling of commodities, service, or information on the Internet by
using mobile hand-held devices (Lee, et al., 2003: 634). The success of M-commerce has partly
been due to the developments of mobile communication technologies, Cellular networks were
originally designed for voice-only communication. To support m-commerce transactions which
are data-based, there has been an evolution of these networks from analogue to digital and from
circuit-switched to packet-switched networks (Hu, et al., 2008) . Here in Malawi we have four
mobile network providers ( TNM, Airtel ,MTL ,Access) these providers have customers around
Malawi , they have transmitters all over the country , unlike in the past when most people didnt
have cell phones which made m-commerce more difficult to be archived now almost 90% of
people have at least a cellphone.
There is a known demand for m-commerce solutions in Malawi among key stakeholders such as
mobile network operators, banks and consumers especially young people (Saidi, 2010) a good
example is national bank it has mobile banking which can be accessed by even a standard phone,

all that is needed is to register by dialing *626# it is called mo626, then you will be able to make
your transactions over the phone, this can be done even with the cheapest phone.

CONCLUSION
Even though m commerce was born out of e-commerce , it has since gained ground in Malawi ,
in the past it faced difficulties of Mobile handset limitation (Saidi, 2010) .This was because most
Malawian did not own cell phones but of late almost everyone has at least a cheap phone . The
other problem that was been faced was lack of proper infrastructure by service providers (Saidi,
2010).Malawi did not have proper ways of channeling data apart from the use of leased lines ,E1
for most , but recently with the coming of fiber m-commerce is said to boost remarkably .And
because of the fact that it does not involve a person sitting on the computer ,it is likely to be
more popular than e-commerce because most people play around with their phones ,and can
easily do their transactions.
E-commerce has also gained ground compared to how people received it a few years ago ,but
one problem that is there is security , people dont really trust doing business on line due to the
increase of cyber theft and scams . Also most people do not have access to internet, so we can
say e-commerce is being used most by businesses not individual while as m-commerce is
appearing to have gained ground and is being used by most people including companies.

REFERENCE
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