Improving the Response Time of Online Buyers in Nigeria: The Way Forward

Though electronic commerce (e-commerce) is yet at its infancy in Africa and other developing countries, several factors such as lack of trust, technology infrastructure, funds and shortage of manpower can be attributed to this. However, the current model of web server response time as it pertains to developing countries will however hinder its general acceptability. The ability of E-commerce sites to satisfy and retain their customers will no doubt depend largely on the quality of their service delivery. Existing Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning architectures for E-commerce placed emphasis on WWW server and bandwidth inadequacies. This study identified the necessity to include client’s device limitation into e-commerce QoS frameworks especially for web applications to be deployed in Africa, if user-perceived QoS (usually measured by response time) is to be improved. As indicated in the study, client’s device limitation is an important factor that should be given priority. Most computer users in Africa due to the high cost of ownership of PCs used outdated or cloned PCs whose performance could not be guaranteed.