Fact is: with the advent of this Pandemic, Jamaica and the Caribbean are presented with the massive opportunity of going hyper-local with eCommerce to meet the fast-changing and rising needs of consumers who want online ordering of everything along with home delivery.
Now we’re seeing startups offering shopping cart enabled websites, banks offering reduced set up fees for their product offerings, new online malls (similar Amazon and Shopify) launching and getting more aggressive in the marketplace and business owners being forced to bite the bullet and get online and get eCommerce-enabled or die.
According to research based on data gathered from Statista, the Caribbean B2C e-commerce market is valued at US$5 billion annually and is growing at approximately 25% a year. But still, in 2020 online payments is still pain even with a few new Fintech startups making a run to solve this very big and lucrative problem.
But these bottlenecks remain :
– the mindset of business owners.
– outdated laws
– legacy banks and their often expensive products
But let’s flashback to 2007, when 80% Of Jamaican Small Businesses said they were not interested in being online. “Eighty percent of Jamaican small and medium-sized businesses surveyed by Central Information Technology Office (CITO) in an e-business adoption survey said they had no interest at all in having a website. Of the surveyed group, 17% had a website and 4% had a website with eCommerce capabilities.”
Ohh my we can only hope things are ah changing!!!