The Challenges of Starting and Operating an E- Commerce Business in Rural Areas

Many people usually choose to go to a big city to work and study.However, to stop the spreading of COVID-19 pandemic, the government has issued a health regulation to stay at home.So, they have to return to their hometown where many of these hometowns often happened to be in rural areas.In this Covid-19 pandemic era, the major trends of e-commerce have proved that online business is an important tool to accelerate the growth of the economy and cater to consumers' demand.However, ecommerce is very rare and difficult to access in rural areas.So, people have observed that there are opportunities to conduct e-commerce in rural areas.Therefore, this paper outlines the various challenges when people are starting and operating e-commerce in rural areas to raise awareness for the people who want to do e-commerce in rural areas, which are: 1) inefficient and incompetent internet services; 2) logistics services; 3) linguistic barrier; 4) affordability and accessibility; 5) trust issues; 6) security; and 7) legal issue.