| dc.description.abstract | The objective of this study was to determine the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on small and medium sized online businesses in Uganda. Therefore, it aimed to find out whether customer age, changes in prices, delivery costs, social media platform used, number of followers online, type of product sold, and the time in which the online businesses were opened had a significant relationship with the effect that the Covid-19 pandemic had on small and medium sized online businesses in Uganda. The study used primary data and was collected using a Google Form on a sample of 96 respondents from various social media platforms namely Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The analysis was done using frequency distribution, Pearson chi-square, and ordinal logistic regression.
In the results, majority of small and medium sized online businesses in Uganda experienced a negative effect from the Covid-19 pandemic on their businesses (43.8%). Slightly over a half of the respondents opened up their online businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic (58.3%) of the total respondents sampled and slightly over a half of the respondents sold products priced between 0 to 100,000 shillings (55.2%). In the bi-variate level analysis, it was found out that the significant factors that influence the overall effect of the pandemic on online businesses were; changes in delivery costs, number of new customers acquired monthly, number of orders received monthly, changes in prices during the pandemic and the time period in which the businesses were opened, whose p-values were less than 0.05 (P<0.05).
There was a decreased probability of online businesses being affected positively by the Covid-19 pandemic if they reduced their prices slightly during the pandemic as opposed to increasing their prices greatly. Businesses that increased their number of new customers slightly had higher probabilities of being affected positively as opposed to negatively by the Covid-19 pandemic than businesses whose number of customers did not change during that period. Businesses whose delivery costs reduced during the Covid-19 pandemic had higher probabilities of reporting an overall positive effect on their businesses in that period as opposed to an overall negative effect, than businesses whose delivery costs either increased or remained constant during the pandemic.
The findings indicated the need for small and medium sized online businesses to; (i) reduce their delivery costs and other overheads during times of crises such as in a pandemic (ii) raise their prices during times of crises (iii) take advantage of paid advertising and marketing to increase the number of new customers they receive | en_US |
