The impact of e-commerce on the sales of small enterprises

Abstract

Small enterprises are struggling to be heard and convince customers to purchase their promising services and solutions. Liaise with customer’s expectations and offer suitable services and solutions is an issue to address. Attracting several customers though is the major issue. E-commerce it is essential nowadays for a small enterprise to promote and sell those promising services and solutions to the open market. eBay, Amazon, Uber and Booking.com are some of the examples demonstrating of how e-commerce can help a business grow. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the impact of e-commerce on the Sales of Small Enterprises. This thesis describes what influenced the e-commerce adoption and what are the limiting factors for the companies when kicked off the transformation process. To collect some answers, I performed a qualitative research and an abductive methodology was utilized. The results of this research and the theory were linked through an extensive analysis process. Remote meetings with small companies were led so as to address some concerns. This study shows that the examined companies have adopted e-commerce already, but the gap between small and large companies is still visible. The decisions for e-commerce adoption are dependent on the knowledge of the owner /manager and e-commerce is extensively used as a marketing tool. Internal efficiency and information exchange between customers (B2C, B2B) or colleagues are the main benefits of e-commerce adoption. The cost is not anymore, the major challenge but lack of knowledge is. Also, many companies are not encouraged enough to make improvements, because of lack of customer demand.