SMEs and Electronic Commerce: The Case of Istanbul

Abstract

Electronic commerce has been increasingly popular and has become a must tool for the enterprises. Since the Internet had started to be used commonly by all segments of the society, electronic commerce gained a crucial significance as a practical way for people to meet their needs. The main purpose of this study is to examine the perception of and the expectations from electronic commerce by Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and to evaluate the effect of the obstacles to e-commerce in the innovation processes and performance. Within this study, the impact of the innovation processes and innovation data sources in the field of electronic commerce on the performance of the enterprises is analyzed. A survey comprising of 50 questions was conducted by the participation of middle and higher level managers of the SMEs in Istanbul. In total, 277 surveys were examined.

Reliability and validity of these surveys were checked via SPSS-17 and evaluated by using the methods of factor analysis, correlation analysis, and regression analysis. As a result, it has been confirmed that factors of innovation processes and innovation data sources have a meaningful relation to the performance of companies. Therefore, the importance and necessity of investing in innovation processes and data sources for increasing the company performance are verified by this study.