Saturday, April 18, 2009

Dear Sir/Madam, the deals are on!

One ICT sub-sector in Ghana that has been difficult to penetrate is e-commerce. It simply is woeful.

Ghana is tucked neatly in the West coast of Africa, the second largest continent in the world in size and population.

While growing up, there was a buzz about a device called the Personal Computer (PC). And growing up, I became fascinated with this new thing. Many years on, I can safely say that my internet-ting is in good hands because I usually get internet access.

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) says that there are 880,000 Internet users as of March 2008, that’s 3.8% of the population.


But one area that has been difficult to penetrate is e-commerce in Ghana. It simply is woeful. In the years leading up to today, many companies have sought innovative ways to buck this trend. BusinessGhana and others have done quite well in this regard.

In brief BusinessGhana operates on what I call the "yellow-pages philosophy" where people come to the site and look for stuff to buy and then…buy them.
It has more or less held a monopoly. Until now.

The place doing well as well is ghanadeals. set up not too long ago, it is seeing a phenomenal growth in traffic over the period of its inception. For a sports journalist like me, the prospect of having to be able to buy goods and equipment peculiar to my job is wonderful.

The hassle of going to town, roaming and sweating before getting my laptop bag or other accessory has seen the back-pages recently. And I'm relishing it. Why don’t you, too.

It’s called, once again, ghanadeals.com.

Enjoy the experience!