Electronic Commerce In Small & Medium-Sized Enterprises

Electronic commerce (e-commerce) has fundamentally changed the way business is done. In the last decade, East Asia Pacific countries witnessed a rapid development in e-commerce. Enormous benefits have been reaped by those first-movers in e-commerce. However, the e-commerce participants are mainly large companies. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been slow in adopting e-commerce. The thesis aims to examine the main factors that have retarded the SEMs'e-commerce adoption in East Asia Pacific countries.This paper starts with a general review of e-commerce and SMEs. In this paper, e-commerce is defined as sharing business information, maintaining business relationships, and conducting business transactions through the Internet. SMEs play a significant role in the economy of East Asia Pacific countries. E-commerce is supposed to be able to bring SMEs great benefits. To encourage SMEs to adopt e-commerce, it is imperative for the governments of these countries to identify the factors that have hampered SMEs'e-commerce adoption and then take measures accordingly.To identify the impediments hindering SMEs'e-commerce adoption in this region, this paper chooses four cases from different countries in this region. Based on the case studies, the thesis identified the following main obstacles to SMEs'e-commerce adoption: poor information infrastructure and low Internet penetration; lack of skills and knowledge of e-commerce; high broadband connection cost; absence of reliable payment systems; and lack of awareness among SMEs about e-commerce. After an analysis of these obstacles, the thesis suggests some measures to encourage SMEs to embrace e-commerce, including improving information infrastructure, building firm-wide e-commerce capacities, improving business access to the Internet, develop a legal framework; and raising business awareness of e-commerce.