The Impact of Business Size and Business Type on Small Business Investment in Electronic Commerce: a study of Swedish small businesses

Abstract

In the past, organisations relied on traditional quantitative metrics, such as Return on Investment (ROI) to make decisions when investing in technology. With the advent of electronic commerce (EC), organisations have had to rethink their investment and acquisition decisions due to the strategic nature of electronic commerce. Where ROI measures have failed, they have been replaced with a plethora of organisational driving forces. This paper focuses on the driving forces behind EC adoption by small and medium enterprises (SME's) and aims to determine the impact of organisational factors such as size and type of business on EC acquisition criteria. The results of a research study carried out in Sweden are presented and suggest that there exist high levels of significance between the size of the business and customer demand, reduced costs, developing new markets and improvement to marketing as driving forces, and the type of business and customer demand, pressure from competition, increased sales and improvement of relationship with business partners as driving forces for EC adoption.