A Generic Framework for Implementing Electronic Commerce ...ijcit.org/jcit_papers/vol-1_no-2/IJCIT-110113.pdf · A GENERIC FRAMEWORK FOR IMPLEMENTING ELECTRONIC COMMERCE IN DEVELOPING

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A Generic Framework for Implementing Electronic Commerce in Developing

Countries S. A. Ahsan Rajon, Abdullah-Al-Nahid and Abu Shamim Mohammad Arif

Abstract—In this paper, we present an effective framework for adapting electronic commerce and e-commerce services in developing countries like Bangladesh. The proposed scheme takes the major issues related to electronic commerce implementation in Bangladesh into concern. Prime contribution of this paper resides in designing and implementing a generic product-independent e-market prototype for developing countries like Bangladesh. We also analyze and specify the unique features prevailing in developing countries which may be pointed as major concerns including opportunities and challenges in implementing electronic commerce. This research also proposes a hierarchical development or implementation of electronic commerce, providing a clear indication of both short-range and long-term planning and policy making. This paper focuses on the socio-economic aspects of e-commerce infrastructure building along with e-commerce service establishment policy with detailed overview on the prospects and corresponding problems of the same from Bangladesh perspective. This paper also investigates various ways of integrating existing infrastructure in implementing electronic commerce in low-income countries. We especially present the adaptability of e-commerce in the possible sectors and provide a methodical study on the strategies of business process re-engineering improving the socio-economic aspects and service delivery with their participation in overall trade and commerce.

Index Terms—Electronic Commerce Implementation Framework, Developing Countries, E-Marketplace, Information and Communication Technology, E-Commerce Prototype.

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1 INTRODUCTIONURRENT century is the era of Information and Communication Technology. The prime concern of this

decade of electronic revolution is to establish and ensure a better way of management, communication and development with the use of information and information-oriented services based on computer and information technology. Crossing the boundary of personal computations and communications, the uses of digital media for greater levels of management has been initialized early in the century. Electronic Commerce or e-commerce may simply be considered as an extension of this trade. With the enhanced facilities of technology for providing smart and easy living, E-commerce has become a prime demand in the world for ensuring better and quicker product marketing, wider and comprehensive representation, stable and competitive pricing throughout the various sectors of business and commerce including other e-services.

An overall study on the impact of e-commerce for the uplift of the economy of developing countries by enhancing

the product presentation style over e-market has been focused in this paper. Here, we consider Bangladesh perspective as the representative analysis-base and try to investigate the same for developing countries.

1.1 Interesting Contributions of the Paper Interesting contributions of this paper includes-

Firstly, it proposes a complete framework for implementing e-commerce in developing countries from the perspective of Bangladesh as a test bed. This paper takes the multi-dimensional factors of electronic commerce into account whereas most of the previous researches (to be best of our findings) primarily focuses on specific issues or factors of e-commerce. Particularly, the prime contribution as well as the most interesting aspect of this paper resides in the implementation i.e. design and development of a generic e-marketplace prototype which is of the very-first kind for Bangladesh. The developed prototype is able to support inhomogeneous products (with brands and models if applicable) with flexible support to add or remove new elements in the market as well as having complete information support for both sellers and buyers. Moreover, it demonstrates the inter-relation of existing infrastructure and e-commerce implementation policy for countries with relatively weak economy.

Secondly, this paper proposes a hierarchical development or implementation of electronic commerce, providing a clear indication of both short-range and long-term planning and policy making. This staged implementation policy may facilitate effective planning and proper service discovery

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———————————————— S. A. Ahsan Rajon is with the Computer Science and Engineering Discip-

line, Khulna University, Khulna-9208 and Faculty of Computer Science, KPCbd, Khulna-9100. Bangladesh. E-mail: [email protected]. Web: http://sites.google.com/site/ahsanrajon.

Abdullah Al Nahid is with Electronic and Communication Engineering Discipline, Khulna University, Khulna-9208, Bangladesh. E-mail: [email protected]

Abu Shamim Mohammad Arif is with the Computer Science and Engi-neering Discipline, Khulna University, Khulna-9208, Bangladesh. E-mail: [email protected].

A GENERIC FRAMEWORK FOR IMPLEMENTING ELECTRONIC COMMERCE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

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with complete support of incorporating the prototyping aspects of successful e-commerce implementation.

Thirdly, we re-investigate the specific challenges and barriers on the way to establish e-commerce in developing countries like Bangladesh. We have also compared the major existing schemes and have analyzed their effectiveness from the socio-economic and techno-infrastructural point of view.

Fourthly, whereas most of the existing researches propose framework for implementing electronic commerce either by adapting the existing resources or by proposing to re-facilitate the infrastructure, it is our major contribution that, we propose a justifiable, feasible and effective framework for implementing e-commerce by ensuring maximum utilization of existing infrastructure as well as providing an indication for initiation of the re-engineering process.

Fifthly, this paper investigates existing dominant researches on electronic commerce adoption from the point of view of effectiveness and relevance of implementation in developing countries. On the basis of this comparative evaluation, this paper tries to illustrate the necessity of developing a separate framework for developing countries.

Moreover, this paper raises some points of concerns which are to some extent unique to Bangladesh and consequently, those issues were not figured out by most existing researches in proposing and directing the implementation of electronic commerce.

1.2 Necessity of Designing Separate E-Commerce Framework for Developing Countries

There are certain factors in developing electronic commerce implementation framework for developing countries which are bit different from the facts and figures of developed and under-developed countries. Consequently, frameworks developed or proposed for developed countries with the “push” architecture are not often suitable for developing countries which require “pull” architecture.

Firstly, in case of developed countries the frameworks are naturally developed with an aim to maximizing the service flexibility and service spans and minimizing the service delivery with little regard for the or resource acquisition whereas in case of developing countries, the goal resides into establishment of the infrastructure of electronic commerce and the main point of barrier is the required amount of investment for arranging infrastructures.

Secondly, for developed countries or even countries with moderate rate of educated people, the framework for e-commerce implementation doesn’t emphasize on the simplified representation of the products or multi-faced input methods to ensure access of the majority of the people since, people are able to comprehend the composed documents over electronic medium. But in case of developing countries which possesses a literacy rate of below fifty percent, it is essential to include audio-visual mediums to actively inform and incorporate them in the framework.

Thirdly, frameworks developed for developed countries doesn’t necessarily focus on the facilitation of e-commerce

mediator devices like computers for individuals or communities rather motivates towards use of those devices for participating into electronic commerce, whereas the prime attention for implementing electronic commerce in developing countries is arranging hardware.

Fourthly, software aspects for e-commerce implementation frameworks may solely rely on customized development whereas because of high development cost of customized software, in most cases e-commerce entrepreneurs of developed countries are to adopt open-source software.

Fifthly, in most of the developing countries, legal aspects for e-commerce framework are not so well established. In case of Bangladesh, the even the ICT policy has not yet got any clear and robust position. Though a number of literatures are available addressing the various benefits of electronic commerce and e-banking, still not any complete and comprehensive legal document is not available for the same. But, in case of developed countries the legal framework has already been well established.

Sixthly, since the frameworks developed for developed countries may consider a single stream of implementation whereas in case of developing countries there may be heterogeneous streams applied hierarchically for implementation of e-commerce.

Moreover, as, consumers’ trust has a positive relationship with attitude and a negative relationship with perceived risk [24], and people of the developing countries does not normally possess mentionable positive attitude, frameworks for implementing developing countries are much more challenging than that of the developed countries. Additionally, because of lower per-capita income, people find it much more risky to be engaged into electronic commerce.

Furthermore, the level of IT maturity and the degree of satisfaction has inter-mediating relationship with the adoption of B2BEC. As the level of IT maturity of the people of the developing countries is not so high as that of the developing countries, adoption methodologies incorporated into the e-commerce implementation must focus on the computer literacy while it is not any important concern for designing the framework for developed countries.

2 ELECTRONIC COMMERCE: THE JOURNEY The term commerce indicates the activity of distributing products and services to the interested parties who possess the capability and intention to buy the materials or products [1], [2]. In the most simplified form, when this type of business or commercial transaction involves digital communication using internet and web-oriented services for information transfer, the overall process is termed as e-commerce [1], [5]. More specifically, electronic commerce may be defined as the process of adapting electronic means especially information and communication technology for providing better, faster and greater services to the consumer as well as facilitating a comprehensive managerial innovative framework encompassing both the customers


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and suppliers. For electronic commerce, this involvement of internet and internet-oriented services may be complete or partial.

In [3], e-commerce has been broadly defined as, “An electronic transaction is the sale or purchase of goods or services, whether between businesses, households, individuals, governments, and other public or private organizations, conducted over computer mediated networks. The goods and services are ordered over those networks, but the payment and the ultimate delivery of the goods or service may be conducted on or off-line”.

The rapid application of e-commerce has tremendously affected the overall business processes from the early 1990. With the evolution of e-marketplace in the place of physical-marketplace has gradually mobilized the overall process of production, presentation and marketing enlarging the spread of marketing. Crossing the geographical boundary, e-transactions has placed a new horizon in world economy by virtue of e-commerce.

The prime objective of e-commerce is to establish a user-friendly, trust-worthy, effective and efficient approach of providing internet centered business transactions [6, 7, 8]. In order to initiate e-commerce in developing countries, there should have legible and reliable implications of the effectiveness of e-commerce and e-commerce services. The only means to ensure this in a feasible, credible and efficient way is to ensure minimum overhead of implementation because; it is the only way through which a low-income person can explicitly become interested with the new technology and different aspects of business and commerce.

2.1 Related Research There are a number of researches regarding electronic commerce, most of which focus on any specific aspect rather than the overall concerns of implementing electronic commerce. Again, most of the electronic commerce research focus on the constraint-less electronic commerce support framework, which may not be feasible for all the countries. Often in such researches, resource i.e. infrastructure and investment are considered easily manageable which is essentially not at all true for developing countries. It is also rare that, any hierarchical architecture for implementing electronic commerce is proposed with specification of the specific stages. Moreover, in spite of a number of researches discussing on the barriers and challenges of implementing electronic commerce, the same for developing countries are not so established.

In [4], useful guidance has been provided for preparing strategic objectives for promoting economic growth by training and supporting SME’s including specification on how to identify e-commerce opportunities, implement them, and monitor their effects; business practices and pit-falls to avoid; how e-government initiatives may be leve-raged by SME’s; how to adapt the techniques for e-commerce to their business environment etc.

An interesting research on e-commerce in the developing world has been presented in [21]. To obtain a simple model of electronic commerce barriers in the developing world, Kshetri used three categories of feedback systems namely

economic, socio-political and cognitive in [21]. Characteris-tics of e-business models that can be successfully employed in developing countries has also been examined in [21]. This paper concludes that, the ability of any company to simul-taneously adapt or deploy and manage e-business models is a crucial e-commerce success factor. Moreover, through case study, authors in [21] remark that, in relatively small markets of developing countries, by bundling together var-ious products and services, firms can add value.

The Obstacles which must be addressed and resolved so as to enable developing countries to take in the evolving digital world economy has also been investigated by Ken-pankho et al. in [22]. They start with statements of expecta-tions for e-commerce like establishment of e-marketplace and e-markets which would be supported by complementa-ry business functions, particularly the essence of e-commerce in helping smaller firms to enter global markets etc. According to their stated outcomes, industry in devel-oping countries should be encouraged to innovate hard-ware and software better towards the needs and circums-tances of developing countries.

The research in [3] investigates whether implementation of Internet-based Business-to-Business e-commerce actually lead to new trading opportunities for producer firms in developing countries. The project focused on B2B e-commerce applications that can be accessed using the Internet by considering two industrial sectors -garments and horticulture. The results of their empirical research showed that business with new firms rarely generated by using Internet-based B2B e-commerce in the form of ‘many-to-many’ e-marketplaces even when some of the expectations about the benefits of better access to information and reduced communication costs were met.

In [24], social and cultural perspectives that impact on B2B e-commerce adoption in developing countries like Thailand have been analyzed. Issues like trust and control, motivational factors, language barriers, lack of initiatives as important concerns has also been focused in that paper.

A detailed overview on the components, status, potential and constraints of e-commerce in Bangladesh has been presented in [14] and [15]. Overview on the existing legislation with comparative analysis of required legislations are also described there. Identifying the challenges, Najmul [15] recommends a couple of remedies. In [16] and [19], players, procedures and problems of implementing e-commerce with Legal and regulatory framework for e-commerce has been discussed. Actions to be taken at national level have also been described in this paper. An Exploratory study on the Barriers to Adopting ICT and e-commerce with SMEs in Developing Countries considering Sri Lanka has been presented by Kapurubandara and Lawson in [17]. A Secure E-commerce Model for Bangladesh using various local pre-paid and debit cards has been proposed by Chowdhury et al. where they focus on solely the payment infrastructure in [2]. In [18], the impact of e-Commerce in the way of Business in Thailand has been conveyed.

A number of domain specific frameworks are also


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available relating information technology, electronic commerce and service evaluation. In [26], Raus et al. establishes that incorporating specific perspectives of each stakeholder in its own domain for evaluation plays vital role for supporting diffusion of Information Technology innovations. They have also developed a value assessment framework that combines the value understanding from both public and private stakeholders. Applying this framework provides common and objective evaluation of the system as well as allows the value assessment of business-to-government IT innovations incorporating different needs and requirements of various current stake holders. This framework simply provides a theoretical evaluation framework rather than implementation framework.

Several researches are also available which focus on the various facts and forces for adopting electronic commerce in developing countries. In [27], Azam and Quadddus looks at the adoption of B2B electronic commerce by the SMEs exploring diversified factors and measures the effects of those factors in explaining the adoption rate. This paper is intended to focus on the SMEs rather than the overall stakeholders whereas our proposed scheme aims to incorporate the overall subjects.

Bangladesh, a small developing country with enormous prospects realizes the importance of implementing e-commerce in Bangladesh. However, because of its financial backwardness and the lack of dedicated technical expertise, it is still now in the initializing step of implementing e-Commerce. Though there are some unformatted steps in implementing e-commerce in Bangladesh, still now the total achievements are not mention-worthy. Being a country with lower income, and lower literacy rate, the concept of e-commerce has not got complete implementation. Although Bangladesh is an agricultural country, because of the shortage of agro-industry, marketing of agro-products as well as primary agricultural products has also not seen the light of increased marketing span. However, this situation may be radically changed by adapting proper and multidimensional use of existing infrastructure.

2.2 Research Methodology In our research, we carried out structural questionnaires in order to have an impartial survey on the e-commerce development issue of Bangladesh. An on-line survey was considered to collect information from the students and teachers of Khulna University to have a comprehensive analysis on the concerned issue. Among the respondents, there were twelve students, four faculty members and two executives. Since this research aims to provide policy guidelines to Bangladesh and is mainly concerned with the identification of potential ways to implement and introduce electronic commerce for socio-economic development of the ordinary people through better and greater service provision, our point of concern was mainly upon the general people and policy makers. Again, alike other developing countries, universities in Bangladesh act as the center for policy analysis and development leaded by the faculty members; for which we put focus on mainly

university personnel in the survey. The questions were divided into three sections. Section 1 comprised of two subsections namely subsection A and subsection B. Subsection A was designated to collect direct information related to the perception of electronic commerce like the feasibility of implementing electronic marketing, architecture of effective customer support service system in Bangladesh. The main aspect of this section was to find out the feelings regarding the necessity of e-commerce in Bangladesh and the type of e-commerce which appears fruitful to the peoples’ opinion. Subsection B aimed to gather information regarding the feasible and cost-effective hierarchical structure of electronic commerce with ordering and delivery subsystem components in point of view of Bangladesh. Section 2 was made up of dichotomous type which required the respondents to answer yes or no only. Questions regarding their current feelings and matchmaking between electronic commerce and traditional commerce focusing on agriculture and agro-based products was the main content of this section. We planned to extract the components of implementing electronic commerce in Bangladesh through ection 2. Section 3 was devoted to collect information regarding the factors that hinders the implementations of electronic commerce as well as the key barriers in getting perceived benefits from electronic technologies. From section three, it was interesting enough to get a couple of nice concepts about the barriers of implementing electronic commerce. From section one and two, we intended to have a list of factors which should be focused in implementing e-commerce.

3 EMERGENCE OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES Electronic commerce is a revolution in the field of trade and commerce. The establishment of electronic commerce has added new dimension in the total scheme of business ensuring smarter and faster service in concerned sectors. In fact, these criteria have established e-commerce as an essential demand of time rather than an additional service.

The economical backwardness of the developing countries focuses the prime essence of implementing e-commerce in developing countries. Without e-commerce it is completely impossible to have global reach of the product, and without wide-spanned market, it is never possible to have greater profit. Secondly, most of the developing and under-developed countries of the world including Bangladesh are agricultural country. There may be a number of agro-products, which possess greater possibility to be marketed crossing the geographical barrier. The scope to eradicating middlemenship in the overall marketing process by adapting e-commerce is also giving rise to the necessity of e-commerce implementation. Moreover, scope of better management and monitoring is leading the world to rush towards e-commerce. The necessity of e-commerce for especially developing countries has been extensively conveyed in the literatures [3], [4], [5], [6], [7] and [8]. Most of these researches focus on the current e-commerce


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situations of e-commerce with necessity of e-commerce and effectiveness of the same for developing countries in Asia without framework details.

With the journey with the global open market, e-banking has become essential. E-Banking is referred to as the integration electronic means i.e. information technology But in case of Bangladesh though PC-Banking (use of personal computers in banking activities) has also been started to use, PC-Home banking (access accounts for transactions by subscribing to and dialing into the banks' Internet proprietary software system through the use of personal computers at home or locations or outside bank branches) has not yet got momentum. As a result none of Business to Business electronic commerce (B2B) or Business to Customer (B2C) is in a sound running in Bangladesh.

4 CHALLENGES IN IMPLEMENTING E-COMMERCE IN BANGLADESH Since any transition is not an easy task, it is supposed not to be n easy task to implement electronic commerce in developing countries. There are certain issues, ingredients or challenges in developing countries like Bangladesh which are unique in comparison with developed and under-developed countries. In comparison with developed countries, developing countries face a lot of challenges which includes-

A. Lack of Education

The main issue in implementing e-commerce is to have its perceived usefulness among the people. In comparison with the developed countries, the rates of literacy in the developing countries are lower. Because of this lower rate of literacy, it is extremely difficult to make the mass people understand the effectiveness of electronic commerce. Since, success of electronic commerce is indicated by the utmost success in implementation as well as the awareness, activity and use of the services by the people, which greatly depends on the level of literacy and mentality of the people, it is to some extent a fate that, implementation of electronic commerce would face communication problems because of lower literacy rates in its application phases.

B. Fragile Economy

One of the important criteria of defining lifestyle is economical status. For the developing countries, it is a fate that the fragile economy resists individuals from investing a threshold amount in transforming the commercial activities to a different dimension. As a consequence, even easier and potential attainment of development becomes impossible. In case of transforming traditional commerce into electronic commerce, certain transformational requirements like computer infrastructure, internet facility, power supply and most importantly an e-marketplace support arises, which are subject to investment. Even though the hardware infrastructure may be attained, support for software i.e. e-marketplace becomes the greatest problem. As a whole, this scale of investment is of no doubt greater for individuals

because of the fragile economical conditions of the people of Bangladesh and hence, even though the importance of electronic commerce may be successfully communicated, its implementation may get stagnated.

C. Power Shortage

Among the infrastructure issues, power is an important point of concern. Power shortage is one of the burning problems in developing countries including Bangladesh. Since the services offered by electronic commerce should must be accessed through computer and internet for which the driving force is electricity, it is necessary to have proper and reliable energy supply. Though the cost of computer and related accessories has already become lower, without the supporting power facilities, it is completely unusable. Still now, large portions of rural areas are far away from the touch of electricity. Even in urban areas, the power supply is unreliable. Reliable power supply is a major hindrance to develop telecom infrastructure in the rural areas. Support for spreading the use of solar energy to minimize this problem is still now limited to proposals and papers. Consequently, it is of prime concern to have support of power in implementing electronic commerce. Without spreading proper energy infrastructure, it may be a challenge to even think of electronic commerce.

D. Unavailable Internet Facility

Lack of Internet facility is a major barrier in implementing electronic commerce. Since services of e-government are to be offered over internet, it is of no means possible to implement e-commerce without proper internet facility. Moreover, in order to reduce the overall cost of establishing broadband infrastructure, it is imperative that power lines should be effective and efficient to support broadband over power line carriers, which may also be barred because of the absence of proper power supply lines.

E. Improper standardization of Bengali Software

One of the main barriers of implementing electronic commerce is the lack of standardization of software development with Bengali interface and local content. Since, e-commerce indicates access of information regarding trade and commerce; without accurate perception and understanding of the conveyed information, it is about meaningless to have the access on that information. This complete understanding may only be possible through the adaption of Bengali in the graphical user interfaces. Because of some unwise introductory steps in establishing the basement of Bengali software development (For example, design of some widely used Bengali software which are based on Latin character set and are not at all Unicode compatible), the journey towards quality software has faced (and still now facing) gigantic problems. With this challenge of local content development, there are also a couple of problems in generic application software support.

F. Absence of effective legal framework Implementation of electronic commerce also requires a consistent and effective legal framework. Though there exists an elementary legal


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framework for ICT, it is required to have a review of that for secured but faster adaptation of ICT in commerce. Since, electronic commerce aims to cross geographical barriers, and usually steps towards attracting consumers even from abroad, it requires acceptable and continued stable legal support which is not so established in Bangladesh. In case of legal support it should be kept in mind that, with the ‘prescriptions’ of donors, the digital divide may not be acute.

G. Discontinuous Human Resource Support

Human resource is an elementary concern for implementing electronic commerce. It is interesting that, though there are bright human resources in Bangladesh, it is deprived from continuous and uninterrupted longer support from those talents because, the blooming of talents and facilities of expressing the talents is not only limited but also to some extent impossible in Bangladesh. Moreover, the attitude of the politicians of considering the talents as a tool to cherish their views also greatly discourages the real talents to participate in policy making or providing other support. This is certainly a major barrier for implementing

NON-GOVT. APPROACH

SUPPORTING INFRASTRUCTURE

CONSUMERS

INFRASTRUCTURE DE-RIVED E-COMMERCE

STRATEGY

OTHER INFRASTRUC-TURE

HARDWARE INFRA-STRUCTURE

BETTER SER-VICE

(LOCALE GUI+INTL.)

ATTRACT TARGET (UNI-

VERSAL GUI)

CUSTOM SOFTWARE

OPEN SOURCE SW

GOVT. POLICY

SECURITY

MONITORING

INVESTORS

M A N A G E M

LOCAL INVESTORS

FOREIGN INVESTORS

TARGET MARKETING INTERNATIONAL

MARKET LOCAL MAR-

KET

LOCATION – BASED SERVICES

GOVT. AP-PROACH

FINANCIAL INFORMATIONAL

LITERACY TECHNICAL

CULTIVATORS

AGRO-PROCESSING

MANAGEME

E-COMMERCE INFRASTRUCTURE

E-COMMERCE IMPLEMENTATION

STRATEGY DERIVED E-COMMERCE

INFRASTRUCTURE

SOFTWARE INFRASTRUC-TURE

AGRICULTURE – BASED E-COMMERCE & SERVICES

AGRO-SUPPORT CENTER INDUDSTRY – BASED

E-COMMERCE & SERVICES

Fig. 1. Proposed Scheme for implementing e-Commerce in Developing Countries from Bangladesh perspec-tive


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electronic commerce.

H. Natural Disasters

There are various unavoidable circumstances, which may also become a gigantic barrier in implementation of electronic commerce. Most of the countries of Asia; fatally the developing countries of south Asia very often faces various natural disasters like flood, hurricane, typhoon and earthquake, Bangladesh being situated in a disaster prone area is flooded almost every year. Cyclones are also the annual fate of Bangladesh. Whereas providing elementary components like foods, drinking waters, dresses and shelters become a great problem after the disasters to the people, it is easily understandable that, to go on with uninterrupted e-commerce in the disaster prone areas is not so an easy task. Since e-commerce is dependent on a couple of infrastructures, maintenance of those with the aim to achieving possible maximum outcomes and services from those even during out-of-normal situations should be well planned.

5 IMPLEMENTATION OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE IN BANGLADESH We have presented an approach to implement e-commerce in Bangladesh ensuring the maximum and effective use of existing infrastructure in figure 1. The overall implementation plan of e-commerce should must focus on current ICT infrastructures along with optimal precedence on security issues and monitoring aspects. The total infrastructure may be considered as software infrastructure, hardware infrastructure and other related infrastructure. The total infrastructure should be viewed in terms of strategy execution. The hardware infrastructure should be taken into consideration with ultimate care because of being a country with lower information and communication peripherals support. As there are two different streams exist parallelly in developing countries including both agricultural and industrial sector, we are to consider them from the view of potential use of existing infrastructure. The prime question that comes in establishing e-commerce for agricultural products and agro-based products is the support for hardware infrastructure to get access in information and communication technology and corresponding services. As in maximum cases, the overall income of the rural people engaged in agriculture is too poor to adapt e-commerce technology with solely their own interest. Again, it is also troublesome to have the total support from and by government to implement robust and efficient e-commerce and corresponding e-services. But, for industry based e-commerce implementation may have a different view. In industry based e-commerce, where the involved parties are in most cases private groups with ultimate aim to profit maximization may be moved to implement e-commerce with newer technology, better and improved infrastructure and developed architecture. Because of this difference in infrastructure and both-side limitations for agro-based e-commerce with both-side

possibilities for industry-based e-commerce, it is a must to have distinct strategy in implementing e-commerce in developing countries like Bangladesh.

6 FRAMEWORK FOR IMPLEMENTING E-COMMERCE There are a number of literatures available emphasizing the development issues of e-commerce. Most of the researches provide a framework for implementing e-commerce in domain specific areas. There is also a wide range of papers describing the features, advantages, challenges and other concerned issues of electronic commerce and electronic markets as well. Though a number of studies regarding the potential sectors of implementing electronic commerce in developing countries and assumed outcome of electronic commerce for the same has been made, a little research is available dedicated to explore the framework of implementing e-commerce in those developing countries. Its is the novelty of this research that, this paper focuses on the e-commerce implementation framework from the point of view of developing countries considering Bangladesh as the pioneer. An overall analysis on the adapted framework for implementing e-commerce in other countries is also incorporated in this paper along with comparative analysis and feasibility study of those schemes. In the following paragraphs we intent to present a detailed of the proposed scheme.

We have proposed two aspects namely agro-based e-commerce and industry based e-commerce from the infrastructural point of view in order to ensure faster, better and effective implementation of e-commerce in Bangladesh. We propose current infrastructure derived strategy for agro-based e-commerce and strategy based infrastructure for industry based e-commerce. The overall running of agro-based industry should be driven by Agro-Support center that will inherently support the village people who are directly related to agriculture and agricultural production in terms of capacity building, logistic support, informational support and other technical cooperation and coordination. This also includes literacy programs, awareness building and supporting measures to equip the cultivators and other stakeholders to have their robust and meaningful presence in e-commerce. The following is a glimpse of some of those points with greater details in section VI.

A. Stage-setting steps for establishing e-commerce

In order to facilitate E-Commerce, we must have proper physical infrastructure. This infrastructure support must be affordable and effective for the country. It is true that, Bangladesh has already joined in the information super highway; the establishment of total fiber-optic based ICT-infrastructure requires a large amount of time as well as subject to huge expense. But, it may be the fastest and most cost effective to establish Broadband over Power Line Communication because the maximum infrastructure already exists. In this stage-setting step, we also intend to emphasize on awareness building. E-Commerce is aimed


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for better and faster customer support, and this enhanced customer support is aimed at the overall uplift of the national economy. This necessity and functionality of E-Commerce should be communicated to the people so that they may realize and evaluate E-Commerce.

One of the main issues for implementing E-Commerce in developing countries is expense. The huge expense of implementing E-Commerce often turns the E-Commerce implementation project into an abandoned one. However, this may be easily handled by involving universities and other organizations in implementation process. The universities and other ICT related organizations may provide major support by providing their experienced IT-experts and concerned human resource. This may also bring a new dimension of research in the organizations. As in Bangladesh, there are more than hundred universities (both public and private) among which about all the universities possess courses and degrees regarding computer science and information technology, there is a great scope to engage large amount of human resource into the design and development of E-Commerce system for all possible sectors. Selecting renowned universities to perform this job with the supervision of honorable experienced teachers may ensure a successful, effective and efficient design, development and implementation of E-Commerce system. The universities may also be benefited with the scope of E-Commerce analysis and implementation related research support.

B. Design issues for implementing Electronic Commerce

The design and implementation of E-Commerce should must take the social, economical and educational issues into concern. The adaptability and effectiveness of the E-Commerce depends mainly on the citizens, as they are the stakeholders of E-Commerce. It should be taken into consideration that, the first language of Bangladesh is Bengali. So that, it would be most effective to ensure the use of Bengali in implementation of E-Commerce for conveying information. The use of Unicode in representation of Bengali text is also expected to facilitate uniform and massively accessible platform. The integration of the facility to provide comments and other information through internet may guarantee the participation of citizens in decision-making and various multidimensional service-oriented processes. We propose to use a Phonetic based encoding scheme for obtaining the information from the concerned parties.

Being a developing country, the development of E-Commerce should must focus on open source software development. As a research contribution there is a great scope of developing rich, effective and efficient applications as open source software development that will comprehensively promote new dimensions in the Information and communication arena of Bangladesh. The main advantage of open source software development is that, it may bring new idea in incorporating various indirect or secondary sectors into a common e-commerce platform which may ensure a robust electronic commerce.

E-Commerce is a large-scale activity which requires large scale data warehouses to be implemented. For faster, reliable and consistent database applications regarding development of E-Commerce, distributed database management may be the most effective. It is also necessary to consider WAP-support for all levels of design and development of services relating E-Commerce. For designing E-Commerce applications in most cases the best suited process model may be prototyping because of its adaptive nature. As, the users of E-Commerce varies from all levels of people, the software design will must consider the acceptability of the software or software components to the mass people. The overall Software development project management should also be reviewed to cope with overall aspects.

C. Support for implementing e-commerce

E-commerce requires proper infrastructure for implementation. This an inseparable major issue of the exercise of E-Commerce too. For developing countries, this is a dire point of concern. In order to facilitate E-Commerce, the essential infrastructure involving computer, internet and human resource is still now a great problem for Bangladesh. If we plan to employ E-Commerce with completely individuals’ interest, it is absolutely impossible to see the light of E-Commerce. Conversely, it is also not possible to provide separate infrastructure for E-Commerce because the economical framework would not support that. The only feasible as well as optimal solution is to arrange the total infrastructure combining the previous two sectors with the use of existing resources. As, in most areas, including rural areas we have secondary schools or madrasas and within the last few years government with the help of various non-governmental sources has already distributed computers and computer peripherals, we may use these schools or madrasas as a information center or service point for facilitating the citizens to have free access to E-Commerce. Basic awareness building may also be motivated from these centers. Besides these, distinct and sophisticated Information Centers equipped with IT-peripherals and support personnel may be established for providing E-Commerce support.

D. E-Commerce to M-Commerce: The Journey Begins

Increase of mobile communication in Bangladesh has made a silent revolution in all the sectors. The spread of the networks has now reached even into the extreme-rural areas. As, people are now more flexible with mobile oriented services, the adoption of m-governance which is to some sense a bridge between E-Commerce and mobile communication with the use of WAP or SMS. M-Governance is also a great concern because of its extreme growth, availability and flexibility. Considering mobiles as a communication tool for all types of service-request and information possessing from citizens may mobilize the E-Commerce process [3].

E. Analysis of proposed e-commerce framework


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In figure 1, we have presented our proposed framework for implementing e-commerce in developing countries in Bangladesh. For the proposed model, we consider the developing countries as mainly agriculture based countries. Implementation of e-commerce has been considered on two basements namely, e-commerce infrastructure and supporting infrastructure. Being a multidimensional activity, it is in-fact impossible to implement e-commerce without the support of related aspects. Moreover, the implementation of e-commerce is directed through the government policy, security concerns and is operated soundly through the effective monitoring of both levels of administration. E-Commerce infrastructure is formed with the integration of software infrastructure and hardware infrastructure. For any developing country, this both software and hardware infrastructure are tough to manage because of the financial backwardness as well as lack of technical personnel. Consequently, on the two main streams of software sources, it is the most feasible and effective for any developing country to adapt open source software. However, there arises the question of required level of customization for making the software user-friendly though integration of locale graphical user interfaces (GUI). It is still now a great point of debate to determine the possible level of service which may be provided through easing the understandable GUI. At this point, the most important concern is strategy and infrastructure. The concerned elements i.e. e-commerce strategy may be derived on the basis of existing infrastructure in order to minimize the establishment cost which is the prime concern for developing countries like Bangladesh and other under-developing countries. For this infrastructure derived e-commerce strategy, as existing resources are given the most priority, it is quite common that, the main focus would be agriculture. That is, agro-based e-commerce may be the best vehicle to run e-commerce for this scheme. Similarly, whenever the scheme for e-commerce implementation is strategy derived, that is, there is a distinct and dedicated large-scale investment for e-commerce; the total strategy should must emphasize the investors’ choice and themes including foreign investors and local investors. This assimilation may also explore the large-scale global market and the technical architecture, robustness, design and other concerned components also varies with this degree of involved parties. It is a key point to note that, for infrastructure derived electronic commerce strategy as well as strategy derived e-commerce strategy, socio-economic aspects like financial status of the people, information-awareness, literacy skill and technical adaptability of inhabitants is very much important which essentially focuses on target marketing and market targeting. The total scheme presented here definitely takes technology-aware management into concern which in terms focuses consumers in all levels.

7 PROTOTYPE OF A GENERIC E-MARKETPLACE FOR BANGLADESH Electronic commerce is a multidimensional activity which encompasses various aspects of services. E-market is such an essential part of electronic commerce. In a very general and practical sense, e-market may be de defined as the virtual arrangement of product presentation, product selling and product buying online. Comparing with a traditional market system, electronic market acts like product show-case as well as product selling outlet. This is particularly important for electronic commerce since in case of Business to Customer or consumer (B2C) electronic commerce. Often the e-market is formed with the indexing or integration of the individual website of the sellers or seller organizations. But developing, managing and administering separate e-commerce websites for individual organizations is not only expensive but also in maximum cases impossible for small and medium entrepreneurs of developing countries. As a result, the only suitable and effective way of incorporating the individual business units’ in e-commerce caravan is to develop an e-market. Again, this e-market should be product independent. That is, the e-market will must be able to accommodate inhomogeneous products at the same time by which the sellers will present their products and buyers will be able to find their respective products. Since e-market serves as the center for e-commerce interfaces, success of implementation and sound running of e-commerce entirely depends on successful development of product independent generic e-market.

As stated earlier, the most important contribution resides in the implementation of a generic prototype of e-marketplace for developing countries. The developed prototype is completely flexible and generic since, it is designed and developed as a knowledgebase formation entity which strengthens its info-base with the interaction of the users and more importantly, irrespective of the type e.g. agro-product, small and medium enterprise product or software, hardware; the proposed prototype provides a comprehensive way of product demonstration. A shopping cart management scheme has also been implemented and integrated with the e-marketplace. The developed prototype is available at [20]. A detailed description of the prototype has also been provided in [20].

Though there are a number of e-commerce sites in Bangladesh which are developed by the major established commercial organizations, it has about no role in incorporating mass people in electronic commerce. Similarly, the e-marketplaces available at other countries are in most cases are not directly applicable for Bangladesh since, the legal support may not be at all positive to adapt those in Bangladesh. One of the main complications regarding adoption of the existing infrastructures resides on the payment scheme issues.

The developed prototype incorporates both seller and buyer to have respective interactions. For the seller affairs the prototype includes seller registration, viewing products by product type or title, viewing products by seller


51

(organization or individual), viewing product or model album, adding product to shopping cart, viewing products added in shopping cart, editing products added in shopping cart, ordering products etc. For the buying perspective the prototype includes buyer registration, adding new product and/or brand with support of product characteristics inheritance, adding new model with support of customization of product specification, inheriting products from the existing list of products i.e. product archive, creating model photo album, viewing orders, order status updating etc. The detailed description of the prototype is beyond the scope of this paper. The detailed document is available in [20].

Fig. 3. The home-page of the developed prototype

The sellers and buyers start their interaction with the developed prototype by providing elementary information about them through the corresponding registration pages.

Fig. 4. Registration scheme of the concerned groups in developed e-

Market prototype

With an aim to formulate the knowledgebase, the facility to incorporate new products has been integrated.

Fig. 5. New Production Registration in developed e-Market prototype

For each product, it is also possible to add new model. The overall statistics is conveyed to the interested people along with detailed description of the products.

Fig. 6. View of Products irrespective of product type in developed e-

Market prototype

The main part resides on the ordering of the products i.e. development of a shopping cart.

Fig. 5. Detailed view of product catalog in developed e-Market proto-

type

The shopping cart is a light-weight shopping cart and primarily deals with the ordering.


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Fig. 6. Shopping Cart implemented in developed e-Market prototype

8 CONCLUSION In this paper, we have proposed a complete framework for implementing electronic commerce in Bangladesh. Here, we have presented an overview on the sectors for adapting E-Commerce from the point of view of the developing countries especially Bangladesh. We have also described the specific issues of implementing e-commerce ensuring effective utilization of existing infrastructure. In order to obtain the framework we have also investigated the challenges and barriers of implementing electronic commerce in developing countries. The main contribution of this paper is development i.e. designs and implementation of a generic e-marketplace prototype for developing countries like Bangladesh where there is a blooming industry sector based on wide-spread agriculture. The overall analysis on the usefulness and effectiveness to establish e-Commerce and e-Commerce services has also been elaborately provided here. A detailed approach for implementing E-Commerce has also been presented in this paper too. We also provide specific recommendations for designing, developing and managing the E-Commerce system in developing countries. It is important to note that, in this paper we have considered as the test bed for proposing the generic framework for implementing electronic commerce. Future works may be dedicated to strengthen the framework by incorporating the expanded test bed with other countries. Moreover, to assess the proposed framework in a more comprehensive manner, greater number of responses may be collected and analyzed. Nonetheless, we may conclude that, implementation of e-Commerce is the only way left to uplift the socio-economic infrastructure of the developing countries into glittering ones.

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S. A. Ahsan Rajon is currently working as a Se-nior Lecturer of Department of Computer Science, KPCbd, Khulna-9100, Bangladesh. Engr. Rajon also served as an Adjunct Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering Discipline, Khulna Uni-versity, Bangladesh. He has several publications in International conferences and Journals. Rajon is also a reviewer of Journal of Engineering and

Technology Research and International Journal of Information Sys-tems. His research interest includes data engineering and manage-ment, information systems and ubiquitous computing. He is a member of Institute of Engineers, Bangladesh (IEB). For more information about Rajon, visit: http://sites.google.com/site/ahsanrajon

Abdullah Al Nahid is currently working as a lecturer in Electronics and communication Engi-neering discipline, Khulna University, Khulna 9208, Bangladesh. After graduation, he joined in his native discipline of Khulna University in 2008. He has made several publications in re-ferred international conferences and journals. He is interested in research on Signal Processing, Telecommunication and Information

Systems.

Abu Shamim Mohammad Arif is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Engineering Discipline in Khulna University, Bangladesh. He graduated in Computer Science and Engineer-ing from Khulna University in 1997. His research interest includes Image Processing, Information Retrieval and Computer Graphics. Before join-ing at Khulna University, he worked as a lecturer

in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Asia Pacific University, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

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