Google testing the waters on same day deliveries Are they trying to create a monopoly in e-commerce?You click an advert,use google wallet to pay and use their delivery services.

1. consumer education + brand awareness i.e where will people look when they want something 2. Distribution. where will verification of the good occur? at the Buyer or the seller? what are the Guarantees? 3. Niches: Geography - Nairobi is already heavily populated with consumer good purchase points. is there value in Extending geographical reach? product: must provide convenience unavailable everywhere else Add to that margins of every kind. profit, transaction fee. transport fees. agent fees. all these must be above a threshold for operational effectiveness.

One of the things people overlook with regards to how fast Mpesa grew is the customer care safaricom got when it adopted a franchise system. In the rural areas people took great comfort that they could approach an agent (a neighbor they were familiar with) and inquire about how the system works. sometimes this assistance continued well over the course of days and weeks. It helped the system gain trust, traction and legitimacy very fast. e-commerce cannot grow that fast. its scope is limited. the only thing that can come close to it is the legitimacy accrued from consumers being aware of your brand and willing to trust it. which is why if you hear a piece of juicy news from someone you know you treat it with doubt until you can confirm from formal channels (news). My mum asked me about olx and i told her it was a website where they sold things. she asked me "whose things do they sell?" The important thing is ownership. when you buy things from tuskys those things belong to tuskys even though they were manufactured by other organisations. when conducting e-commerce, ownership can be a frustrating target that is often characterized by fear. That is where brands come in. they offer a guarantee to consumers that the only person they have to deal with is this organisation. It precedes all else and permeates every transaction conducted. Thank you for the welcome note, am glad to be here

Btw on the issue of distribution, there are thousands of post offices with Intelsat dishes and ample space all over the country. it would be much easier for them to leverage this to become the distribution backbone of the nation. instead they choose to start a bank?? Streamline all operations, invest in logistics software , expand County HQ's to handle packaging and distribution and set up post offices as collection points and boom deliveries within 2 days everywhere in kenya I agree with you on almost all the issues but i would like you to note that in-order for e-commerce to be effective it must compete with traditional models on market share. ie significant amounts of trade must happen online and significant organisations and people must do business online. we cannot for example have one very well performing good (e.g music) or one demographic (college students) or one organisation (e.g olx). while all this can be a starting point IT MUST demonstrate the ability to grow beyond that. That part about interactions is very very important. Whoever wins in this e-commerce game makes amazon money.

Hello Chessmaster, I agree with this 110% Internet businesses are based on network externalities. and as you rightly pointed out, its all slowly taking shape.