E-Commerce Adoption Barriers in Small Businesses and the Differential Effects of Gender

2009 ◽  
pp. 429-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert C. MacGregor
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Commerce ◽  
Small Businesses ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Internet Technologies ◽  
Differential Effects ◽  
Government Organizations ◽  
Males And Females ◽  
Level Of Importance

Over the last decade, the Internet and Internet technologies such as electronic commerce have experienced phenomenal growth. However, research shows that small businesses have been slow to adopt and to implement e-commerce due to a variety of barriers or impediments. Our understanding of these barriers and their importance has been fragmented and incomplete. This article presents an exploratory study of regional small businesses in Sweden that aims to improve our knowledge about e-commerce adoption barriers and to determine if there are any differences in the level of importance assigned to different barriers by males and females. The results of the study suggest that e-commerce adoption barriers fall into one of two distinct groupings: too difficult to implement or unsuitable to the business. The results also show that while males rate the difficulties of implementing e-commerce as more important, females indicate more concern about the unsuitability of e-commerce. The results of the study have significant implications for government organizations engaged in promoting e-commerce adoption, particularly among small businesses in regional areas.

Electronic Commerce Opportunities, Challenges and Organizational Issues for Australian SMEs

2011 ◽  
pp. 297-314
Author(s):  
Mohini Singh
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Commerce ◽  
Small Businesses ◽  
Small And Medium Enterprises ◽  
Process Reengineering ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Organizational Issues ◽  
Integrated Environment ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Medium Enterprises

Australian small businesses are increasingly adopting the Internet and the World Wide Web as a medium of doing business to reach new customers and suppliers, cut costs and expand business. They also use it to enhance communication between buyers and suppliers. This chapter discusses the findings of an exploratory study in Australia that identified the objectives, opportunities and challenges of e-commerce experienced by small businesses that were mostly early adopters of the Internet as a medium of trade. E-commerce issues presented in this chapter include research findings, supported by theory from literature. Electronic commerce opportunities, challenges and organizational learning by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Australia indicate that small businesses have created value with e-commerce, although benefits are long term and dependent on a plethora of technological, business and management issues that need to be addressed. Due to the fast-evolving nature of e-business and technological developments that are new to many small businesses, challenges such as managing the expanded flow of information, cross-border taxation, authentication, trust and security, as well as the high costs of acquiring the required technologies and skills, are prevalent. Other challenges of e-commerce range from Web site maintenance to business process reengineering for an integrated environment. Research findings also highlight the fact that small businesses need formal methods of evaluating the performance of e-commerce to realize the benefits of investment and to further expand their e-commerce venture.

Electronic Commerce Opportunities, Challenges and Organizational Issues for Australian SMEs

2011 ◽  
pp. 316-333
Author(s):  
Mohini Singh
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Commerce ◽  
Small Businesses ◽  
Small And Medium Enterprises ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Organizational Issues ◽  
Integrated Environment ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Medium Enterprises ◽  
Flow Of Information

Australian small businesses are increasingly adopting the Internet and the World Wide Web as a medium of doing business to reach new customers and suppliers, cut costs and expand business. They also use it to enhance communication between buyers and suppliers. This chapter discusses the findings of an exploratory study in Australia that identified the objectives, opportunities and challenges of e-commerce experienced by small businesses that were mostly early adopters of the Internet as a medium of trade. E-commerce issues presented in this chapter include research findings, supported by theory from literature. Electronic commerce opportunities, challenges and organizational learning by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Australia indicate that small businesses have created value with e-commerce, although benefits are long term and dependent on a plethora of technological, business and management issues that need to be addressed. Due to the fast-evolving nature of e-business and technological developments that are new to many small businesses, challenges such as managing the expanded flow of information, cross-border taxation, authentication, trust and security, as well as the high costs of acquiring the required technologies and skills, are prevalent. Other challenges of e-commerce range from Web site maintenance to business process re-engineering for an integrated environment. Research findings also highlight the fact that small businesses need formal methods of evaluating the performance of e-commerce to realize the benefits of investment and to further expand their e-commerce venture.

scholarly journals E-commerce as a tool for the development of small business

2021 ◽  
Vol 106 ◽  
pp. 01022
Author(s):  
Niiara Demiroglu
Keyword(s):  
Small Business ◽  
Electronic Commerce ◽  
Small Businesses ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Internet Technologies ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
The Past ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Coronavirus Infection ◽  
Use Of Social Media

E-commerce has gained particular importance for the development of small businesses in the past year due to the restrictions imposed due to the spread of the new coronavirus infection. The article provides a review of scientific literature in order to generalize the methodology for defining the concept of “electronic commerce”. The main trends in the field of e-commerce in small business are characterized. The data on the development of the e-commerce market are analyzed and the following is emphasized: in the number of purchases from mobile devices has increased; creation and widespread use of social media pages is a key factor in the development of e-commerce by entrepreneurs. The advantages and disadvantages of using electronic commerce by small businesses are systematized. Conclusions are made about the growth in the volume of transactions using Internet technologies, and about the increase in digitalization of small businesses.

Exploratory Study on the Perceived Importance of Various Features of the Internet Service as Influenced by the Perceived Necessity of the Internet and the Size and Type of Small Businesses

2010 ◽  
pp. 364-384
Author(s):  
Minh Q. Huynh ◽  
Avinash M. Waikar
Keyword(s):  
Economic Activity ◽  
Small Businesses ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Significant Proportion ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Internet Service ◽  
New Era ◽  
Perceived Importance

In the new era of e-commerce, small businesses have emerged as the driving force because these firms comprise a significant proportion of economic activity. The spending of small businesses on IT activities continues to grow as they rely more and more on the Internet to be competitive. All these indicate a potential lucrative market for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to serve small businesses. But how to do so? This study attempts to identify Internet service features that are important to small businesses as a way for the ISPs to exploit this potential lucrative market. It explored how various features of the Internet service were associated with the “perceived necessity” of the internet and the “size” and “type” of small businesses. Understanding these associations might help the ISPs better package their service and more successfully serve their small business clients.

Electronic commerce opportunities for improving corporate customer support in banking in Greece

2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (7) ◽  
pp. 292-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dimitris Kardaras ◽  
Eleutherios Papathanassiou
Keyword(s):  
Information Systems ◽  
Electronic Commerce ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Banking Sector ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Successful Development ◽  
Customer Support ◽  
Management Actions ◽  
Customer Services ◽  
Greek Banks

Banking, one of the most information intensive sectors, is an ideal domain for the successful development of e‐commerce. The present exploratory study focuses on e‐commerce opportunities for improving corporate customer services in the Greek banking sector. It reports on a survey of 11 marketing and information systems managers from five major Greek banks. The results indicate that the potential of e‐commerce ranges from simple applications, such as giving information about services, to more sophisticated ones that involve customers in services design and customisation. Suitable management actions are proposed to Greek banks in order to fully benefit from the Internet.

Implementation of Quality of Service in VoIP

2009 ◽  
pp. 655-660
Author(s):  
Indranil Bose
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Service ◽  
Internet Protocol ◽  
Service Differentiation ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Network Resources ◽  
Voice Communication ◽  
Internet Technologies ◽  
Government Organizations

Today, Internet technologies have pervaded every corner of our society. More and more people are benefiting from the Internet in one way or the other. One of the current Internet technologies that may benefit us greatly is voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). According to Hardy (2003, p. 2), VoIP is “the interactive voice exchange capability carried over packet-switched transport employing the Internet protocol.” With VoIP technology, one can call anyone in this world at a lower cost, compared to traditional telephone systems. However, VoIP technology has one significant drawback. It has a low degree of reliability. From experimental results it is known that VoIP can achieve only 98% reliability. The service down time per year for VoIP is almost 20 working days (175 hours). For most companies and government organizations, such a degree of reliability is unacceptable since the traditional telephone system can achieve 99.999% reliability with a service down time of only five minutes per year (Kos, Klepec, & Tomaxic, 2005). As a result, quality of service (QoS) is an important concept for VoIP. Using QoS, VoIP may be able to overcome its limitation in reliability. QoS is often defined as the capability to provide resource assurance and service differentiation in a network. The definition includes two important terms—resource assurance and service differentiation. Resource assurance provides a guarantee about the amount of network resources requested by the user. On the other hand, service differentiation provides higher priority of getting network resources to those applications that have critical latency constraints. Given the importance of low latency for voice communication, it is not difficult to predict that QoS will assume greater importance in the VoIP industry as this technology gains popularity in the mass market. It is reported that VoIP is aggressively growing, and this growth is expected to continue in the coming years.

Networks and Electronic Commerce Adoption in Small Businesses

2005 ◽  
pp. 2085-2094
Author(s):  
Lejla Vrazalic ◽  
Deborah Bunker
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Commerce ◽  
Small Businesses ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Global Market ◽  
Critical Area ◽  
Important Indicator ◽  
Market Turbulence ◽  
Adoption And Diffusion ◽  
The Impact ◽  
And Diffusion

The adoption and diffusion of electronic commerce (e-commerce) in small businesses remains a critical area of investigation in information systems (IS) literature. A number of studies (Miles, Preece, & Baetz, 1999; Overby & Min, 2001) have suggested that in order to accommodate a technologically uncertain and globally focussed economy brought on by the advent of e-commerce, many small businesses are turning toward some form of alliance or network where the locus of the impact of change is interorganisational rather than organisational. Alliances or networks are formed entities that have a defined set of shared values, roles, responsibilities, and governance. Through involvement in such networks, small businesses not only find a ready source of technical and marketing expertise, but the very nature of the network “buffers” the impact of global market turbulence. This would suggest that belonging to a network is an important indicator of successful e-commerce adoption. However, a number of authors (Drakopoulou-Dodd, Jack, & Anderson, 2002; Dennis, 2000; McBer & Company as cited in Dennis, 2000) have found that many small businesses avoid network arrangements. Despite the widespread existence of networks, no research studies to date have formally compared networked and nonnetworked small businesses in relation to e-commerce adoption. This article presents the results of an exploratory study that aims to correct this oversight.

Implementation of E-Commerce at the Grass Roots

2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hakikur Rahman ◽  
Isabel Ramos
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Electronic Commerce ◽  
Business Models ◽  
Developing Nations ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Human Computer Interactions ◽  
Main Thrust ◽  
Internet Technologies ◽  
Grass Roots

This paper looks into the concepts of electronic commerce (e-commerce) through the utilization of the Internet technologies. The study introduces the concept in finding a contextual diagram and talks further about the evolution of e-commerce. Thereafter, it develops a framework after deducting through various business models using an exploratory review. However, the main thrust of the paper is to illustrate factors of challenges in introducing and enhancing e-commerce activities, especially in the context of developing countries relating to human-computer interactions. The study emphasizes on issues like, acceptability, credibility, feasibility, ethics, privacy and trust as major challenges in expanding e-commerce in developing countries. Before concluding, the study proposes a few hints of e-commerce advancement in developing nations as future research.

Matching Innovation Strategy to the Lifecycle of the Firm

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 42-49
Keyword(s):  
Small Businesses ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Innovation Strategy ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Innovation Strategies

This exploratory study looks at the innovation strategies employed during specific stages of the firm lifecycle for small businesses. The study locates and uncovers seven themes surrounding the intersection of innovation strategies and the different stages of the firm. In so doing, future directions to answer the questions uncovered by this exploratory study are suggested.

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