Workstreams

Significant disparities persist in ecommerce use between urban and rural firms, and between women and men in access to technology and business opportunities. The eTrade Alliance pioneers in identifying and bridging in-country disparities in digital trade by engaging remote and rural firms and local leaders in ecommerce development, and identifying new ways to bolster women-led firms' use of ecommerce.

Long delivery times and high delivery costs are a major obstacle to cross-border ecommerce. They have various sources – cross-border shipping fees, arcane customs procedures, and high costs of inland delivery especially to rural areas.

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The Alliance’s work on ecommerce logistics goes to the heart of these challenges. We map and measure the costs of ecommerce delivery in selected trade corridors, and develop pioneering use cases and proofs of concept for delivery, address, and logistics payment technologies aimed at containing especially last-mile delivery costs.

Online sellers frequently require small working capital injections to fulfill new orders they receive online, but securing bank loans is very difficult for MSMEs in developing countries.  The eTrade Alliance is architecting and promoting ambitious solutions to address these challenges, such as a uniform corporate digital ID that would enable MSMEs to access financial services with greater ease, an eLoan Guarantee aimed to expand lending from developing country FinTechs; and digital finance solutions that developing country farmers can access through their smartphones.

Developing country MSMEs often lack the skills required for building competitive online sales capabilities. These firms often need much more professionalization to run their online stores and internationalize, such as improvements in inventory management, customer data analytics, digital marketing, and global shipping.  They also tend to need new financial instruments to acquire these capabilities.

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The Alliance is training MSMEs in developing countries to set up online stores, get on global online platforms, and train online sellers to export. We pay particular attention to women-led and rural firms. We further apply scalable AI-driven skills development and job matching platform to enable especially young people in developing countries to gain the skills to thrive in digital and ecommerce businesses.

The Alliance is also working toward a "Digital Transformation for Trade”-facility to enable developing country MSMEs to access resources for acquiring the capabilities they need to thrive as online sellers, and a 360 Ecommerce Academy learning resources for online sellers to professionalize their businesses.

As developing country consumers and firms turn to transact online, regulations governing digital payment, FinTech, and cybersecurity critically shape firms’ costs of doing business and access to new markets. The eTrade Alliance aims to further strengthen developing country regulators and policymakers’ ability to adopt policies and champion technologies conducive to MSME ecommerce, and facilitate the formation of public-private partnerships and initiatives around the developing world to solve key challenges to digital trade.