Electronic Commerce Use in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

Abstract

The Internet and Electronic Commerce (EC) related practices were surveyed in ninety-four small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) from a region of the Northeastern United States. Only 6.3 percent of the firms’ sales was found to be attributable to e-commerce business. The results suggest some relationships of a firm’s sales and profitability on one hand and the firm’s Internet use on the other hand. Firms that rated their profitability and sales levels to be higher seem to have higher use of the Internet to gather distributor and vendor information, to conduct online purchasing, and to promote their products online. The majority of the firms surveyed tend to use e-mail to a great extent for communications internally among employees and externally with customers, vendors and distributors. Higher levels of e-mail usage for internal and external communications tend to associate with higher levels of reported sales and profitability. However, the findings suggest that most of the SMEs do not employ the Internet to its full capacity. In order for SMEs to advance their EC activities they need to develop their own EC strategies and to secure the managerial, human, financial, and technological resources to effectively implement them. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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