The Potential of E-commerce for SMEs in a Globalizing Business Environment

In an era of globalizing economies many markets become increasingly international and competitive. Technological progress in logistics and distribution enables nearly every business to buy, sell and cooperate on a global scale and even smaller and locally oriented businesses are forced to see themselves in a global context to survive in this new challenging business environment. Although common sense is that the globalization expose SMEs to many challenges the recent literature argues that SMEs can benefit the new environment via e-commerce. In this framework this study presents the issues the SMEs can face in changing business environment and the potential of e-commerce in this new environment. The findings of the study shows that although their size is a disadvantage for SMEs to compete in global platform e-commerce can help them make up however there are several barriers that limit or prevent them from getting into e-commerce which can be handled with public and private support. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd