Impact of E-Commerce Adoption as a Competitive Strategy in Rwandan Market: A Case Study of Jumia Food Rwanda

As competition intensifies, many businesses continue to look for profitable ways to differentiate themselves from competitors. Every organization needs to adopt strategies which will enable it to have a competitive edge over the other players in the market. Competitive strategies in businesses have become very critical for their survival since they are operating in a very turbulent environment. In order to survive and remain profitable in the competitive environment, it becomes necessary for businesses to be aggressive in their search and development of strategies that provide competitive advantage as they step up defensive strategies. Hence this study seeks to fill the existing research gap by conducting a study to investigate the impact of e-commerce adoption as a competitive strategy in Rwandan market with a reference of JUMIA Food Rwanda. The study was built on both general and specific objectives. The specific objectives were, to ascertain the effectiveness and efficiency of e-commerce adoption in JUMIA Food Rwanda, to evaluate the outcomes of e-commerce as a competitive strategy in JUMIA Food Rwanda over other strategies, to examine the relationship between e-commerce adoption and performance of JUMIA Food Rwanda. In order to reach the achievement of the above objectives, a combination of questionnaires, interviews, documentary reviews and analyzing financial and other reports were used. The researcher adopted descriptive research design. Questionnaires were distributed to a group of 98 respondents, however, only 84 questionnaires were well filled and returned for analysis. This represented a response rate of 85.7 %, which is good enough to draw conclusion from. Stratified simple random sampling technique was applied in the study. The data were analyzed using SPSS for descriptive statistics to test the effectiveness and efficiency of e-commerce at JUMIA Food Rwanda. Correlation analysis and regression analysis were used to determine the nature and magnitude of the relationship between the study variables. Findings revealed that there were effective and efficient e-commerce at JUMIA Food Rwanda and this was in support of 76.2 % of the respondents who agreed on that the infrastructure lowers costs. Secondly, research results represented by 75.0 % of the participants cited better performance in JUMIA due customer base expansion as a result of e-commerce as a competitive strategy. In addition strategy outcomes, it was evidenced that the net profit margin of JUMIA Food Rwanda increased greatly from 2014 to 2017 and this is represented by 30.7 to 37.2 respectively As it is revealed in table 4.9, the value of rs=0.703 and p=0.004 which explains that there was a strong, positive monotonic correlation between e-commerce and the strategy (=.703, n = 84, p less than.004). Regression analysis revealed that the value of adjusted R squared was 0.779, an indication that there was variation of 77.9 % on strategy outcomes to the changes in e-commerce particularly electronic ordering, electronic billing and electronic payment. Management was recommended to use e-commerce components to watch over safety measures and risk. Government was recommended to sensitize the general public on electronic commerce. JUMIA Food was recommended to extend its services to other secondary cities of Rwanda.