Volume 2

13 pages 1058 K bytes

Electronic Commerce: An Alternative for Small Businesses Ghasem S. Alijani Southern University at New Orleans New Orleans, LA 70126 Nnenna A. Amugo Southern University at New Orleans New Orleans, LA 70126 Sam Eweni Southern University at New Orleans New Orleans, LA 70126 J. Steven Welsh Southern University at New Orleans New Orleans, LA 70126 Boumediene Belkhouche Tulane University New Orleans, LA 70118

Abstract: Electronic commerce technology offers new opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises to extend their customer base in the global marketplace. One of the major technological challenges for many of these businesses is the lack of both information technology skills and knowledge about electronic commerce. Adopting electronic commerce can be difficult and without these needed skills and appropriate knowledge, businesses cannot make sound decisions for either daily or long-term operations. The purpose of this research was to investigate the success and failure rates of small businesses that engaged in electronic commerce by evaluating their sales performance. The data used included both the revenues from total sales and the electronic commerce portion of these revenues for the period of 1998-2001. Factors investigated included the year-to-year change in revenue and the percentage of total sales related to electronic commerce.

Keywords: electronic commerce, business-to-business, business-to-customer, B2B, B2C

Download this issue:   ISEDJ.2(29).Alijani.pdf   (Adobe PDF, 13 pages, 1058 K bytes)

Preview the contents:   Alijani.txt   (ASCII txt, 27 K bytes)

Recommended Citation: Alijani, Amugo, Eweni, Welsh, and Belkhouche (2004). Electronic Commerce: An Alternative for Small Businesses. Information Systems Education Journal, 2 (29). http://isedj.org/2/29/. ISSN: 1545-679X. (A preliminary version appears in The Proceedings of ISECON 2003: §2121. ISSN: 1542-7382.)