The Effect of Using E-commerce on Performance of Large Retail Organisations: During the COVID-19 pandemic: A Comparative study of Businesses in Harare

Abstract

Locally, there have been no studies on the impact of e-commerce on organisational performance in the retail sector, despite calls by many researchers and the government of Zimbabwe calling retailers to intensify the adoption of online means of trading. The main objective of the study is to examine the influence of e-commerce on the performance of medium to large retail organisations in Harare during the COVID 19 pandemic. The study was guided by the pragmatic philosophy, ultimately the mixed method approach was employed. The study adopted a case study research design in which grocery retailers in Harare, Zimbabwe were studied. A sample of 291 respondents (determined by Krejcie and Morgan (1970) table) were chosen using simple random sampling from a population of 1200 administrators. On the other hand, qualitative data was determined by saturation point at 12, thus became the sample size. The researcher personally administered questionnaires by hand-delivering them to the respondents’ work-stations during the whole month of September 2022. Both quantitative and qualitative results established that e-commerce strategies positively influence supermarkets as those retailers who used online means of trading had had their performance improved during the pandemic. More so, findings established that organisations using e-commerce perform better than those who do not employ the online methods. The study concluded that technological innovativeness is one of the sustainable key strategies in the Zimbabwe retail supermarket industry during and after COVID-19 era. It is recommended that for retail organizations to effectively use e-commerce to improve their performance, they ought to invest into online initiatives by acquiring the necessary infrastructure. Future studies need to also look at barriers and driving forces for retailers in adopting ecommerce.