--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Blog Home Shop now! About Media Showcase Links
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sunday, April 15, 2001

Media: Computer and Technology News: Africa's Shopping Mall Launched

Computer and Technology News, Ghana, April 2001
Africa's Electronic shopping mall launched

An African art and craft ecommerce website has been launched in Accra. The website eShopAfrica.com is a business to business site with the objective of selling indigenous African manufactured products online to retailers and resellers around the world. The site, perhaps the most comprehensive and marketable website to come from Ghana, has an impressive collection of African products including cloths from West Africa, coffins from Ghana, beads from the sub region and masks and sculptures from all over Africa. The site also provides visitors the opportunity to personalise the products they want to and have them delivered.

The amazing story of eShopAfrica.com is that of four wonderful expatriate women: Cordelia Salter, technical member, Tine Knott, marketing member, Trish Graham, products member and Kawther El Obeid, business member coming together from different fields of endeavour and working from home to create what one IT professional at the launch remarked 'is the most practical example of ecommerce yet to come from Ghana'.

eShopAfrica.com uses an ecommerce software package designed for small businesses that want to sell on the Internet but can't afford large overheads, and this according to Salter-Nour is why anybody who wants to sell on the web should be able to do so. Through the technology of the Internet the eShopAfrica.com team hopes to give local artisans access to the global market. They say: 'It's time for ordinary Africans to start benefiting from connectivity.'

Even though the eShopAfrica.com team believe they will be bigger they say they intend to do things the African way and that they do not intend to destroy the way of production of the African people and that people will as El Obeid puts it 'not have to stop going to funerals because orders are so huge - we will remain big but small'

Copyright CTN Ghana ctn@ighmail.com