ICTs, e-commerce & CCT in Ghana: The Case of Urban Consumers in a Developing Country

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End date: 31 August, 2015 Project type: BSU Students' Master Thesis Project code: mge 13-4A1BSU Countries: Ghana Lead institution: Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Denmark Project coordinator: Eunice Ackom Sampene

Project summary

Online shopping is born and arguably here to stay thanks to globalisation and advancement in technologies, bringing with it several advantages and thus attracting several businesses across the globe. Businesses and consumers mainly in Accra and Kumasi in Ghana have caught up with this trend, adopting some forms of e- commerce but its assimilation faced several pertinent challenges just like other developing and non-western economies. The paper adopted Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) to explain this phenomenon by looking at the role CCT plays in the problems of e-commerce assimilation in urban areas in Ghana as CCT researches have enabled a spectacular improvement into our understanding of markets and consumption. The paper found that though these urban areas were experiencing technological leapfrogging, they were not necessarily incorporated into the global e-commerce trend rather still relied very much on the traditional and cultural forms of commerce mixing it up with e-commerce. As such, most Ghanaian businesses that adopted it do not do pure e-commerce; rather they incorporate it with parts of traditional commerce to suit the consumption culture, preferences and rituals of the environment i.e. moving from traditional to click-and-mortar.

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