Predicting the Growth of e-Commerce using Trendline Analysis: A Case Study of Ogun State, Nigeria

There is a growing interest from e-commerce planners and other planning agencies in the Information Technology world to measure and forecast the growth of e-commerce in developing countries like Nigeria. The difficulties lie in finding the best forecasting model that can incorporate both the internal and external barriers that influence the full adoption and diffusion of e-commerce. This study attempts to identify the relevant e-commerce tools and its spread in Ogun East Senatorial District as well as formulating a mathematical model for e-commerce adoption and diffusion. A well-structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 126 respondents and analyzed using Trendline, a built-in analysis tool in Microsoft® Office Excel version 2013. The study identified PCs/laptops, ATM cards, e-mail services, mobile money transfer, e-commerce Websites, and point-of-sales (POS) terminals as e-commerce tools used by the respondents. The results of the study show that majority of the e-commerce users/adopters were single female students between the ages of 21 and 30 years, with university education owing to a proportion of 63% of the respondents while the earliest adopted e-commerce tools in descending order were tablets/smartphones, PCs/laptops, ATM cards, and email services. The results further show that the most popularly-used tools were e-commerce websites (98% responses), email services (94% responses), mobile money transfer (94% responses), POS terminals (94% responses), tablets/smartphones (93% responses), PCs/laptops (87% responses) and ATM cards (80% responses). Based on the findings of this study, it is therefore recommended that government should promote the use and development of e-commerce, notably by reducing the costs of access to technology, through the liberation of trade in software and hardware.