Small And Medium Enterprises ( Smes ) - 1423 Words

Introduction Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) normally share the characteristic of limited scale in their operations, and they play significant important role in economic development in many countries around the world (Kotelnikov, 2007). Although SMEs contribute lots of stimulus to the national economy, they commonly suffer from a lack of nationwide geographical presence and an inability of provide their services 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. The implementation of e-commerce eliminate these adverse conditions and promotes SMEs to extend wider markets without expanding their physical presence (Quaddus Hofmeyer, 2007). E-commerce has a strong appeal to SMEs because it is able to make geographic locations, distances and time†¦show more content†¦In the realty, due to various products carried and the low profit margin, the retail sector gradually become the pioneer of the implementation of e-commerce to improve efficiency and thus it is able to provide an appropriate and useful conte xt to investigate e-commerce implementation (Reardon Hopkins, 2006). In addition, this sector have a great influence on in economic development in Australia. The definition of e-commerce E-commerce is short for Electronic Commerce and over years there are different definitions of it. Since e-commerce is identified diversely by various scholars, many researchers normally used the term e-commerce based on their research scope. In this study, the definition of e-commerce provided by Turban, Lee, King, Mckay, and Marshall is adopted since it is simple yet comprehensive. According to Turban et al. , e-commerce is to the process of buying, selling, or exchanging products, services and information via computer networks, including the Internet† (Turban et al. ,2008; p. 4). When e-commerce is implementation successfully, it can provide companies with a wide range of chances for improving some important business activities, for example, trading relationship, exchanging information, co-ordinating logistics and communication through regional or global supply chains (Humphrey, Mansell, Pare, Schmitz, 2003). Benefits of implementation of e-commerce in SMEs In recent years, there are