Nabea,Henry Nkoru2025-02-252025-02-252018-12Nabea, H. N. (2018). Usage and Perceived Risks of Commercial Websites in Kenya.Online 2319–7722,(Print):2319–7714https://repository.chuka.ac.ke/handle/123456789/16554hnabea@chuka.ac.keCommercial websites are a form of internet advertising which is formed by companies as an advertising tool hosting many forms of online advertisement to promote products and services. Researchers and practitioners have equally agreed on the abilities of a commercial website as an advertising instrument that offers unlimited potential and benefits. This study sought to investigate consumers’ uses and gratifications obtained from commercial websites advertising in Kenya. The study employed descriptive research design. Purposive sampling procedure was used to sample Nairobi. Random sampling was used to sample Kenyan 384 commercial websites users with a from a target population of one million users. A pilot study was carried in Thika town to establish reliability and validity of the research instruments. The researcher used CronbachAlpha co-efficient to test the reliability of the instruments. A reliability co-efficient of 0.985 was obtained from thequestionnaires.Descriptivestatistics wasusedtoevaluatecollecteddatausingcategoriesbasedonresearch objectives using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 17.0.The research established that the strongest reason users have for visiting commercial websites is to share media such as pictures, videos, music and blogs. Six categories of reasons for using commercial websites were identified as socialization, information seeking, convenience, entertainment, relaxation and passing time. The challenges faced bycommercial websites users identified in this study were slow loading, clutter, high costs, fraud, identity theft, and complexity of use. The reasons as to why consumers avoid certain commercial websites were found to beimmorality, addiction,risk of loss of money, manipulation and poor advertisements. The study recommends that commercial websites should include social share and follow buttons to encourage social interactions from of online buyers to ensure business sites take full advantage of the ever increasing social media traffic in Kenya and that commercial websites should work on mobile phone optimization because of increased Smartphone usage in Kenya. This study is also of the recommendation that websites should be kept consistent in order to improve readability and that company webmasters must ensure websites are safe from vulnerabilities.enWebsiteAdvertisingUsePerceptionArticle