The Adoption of Electronic Commerce by Small and Medium Enterprises in Pretoria East

• Published in: The Electronic journal of information systems in developing countries 2015-05, Vol.68 (1), p.1-23
• Main Authors: Garg, Ajay K, Choeu, Thobeng
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adoption; Electronic commerce; E‐commerce; Information systems; Pretoria; Qualifications; Small and medium enterprise; Small and medium sized enterprises; South Africa
• ISSN: 1681-4835; 1681-4835
• DOI: 10.1002/j.1681-4835.2015.tb00493.x

The objectives of this study were to determine the current level of e‐commerce adoption and factors that motivates the adoption by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Pretoria East. A structured questionnaire survey was distributed to 200 randomly selected small and medium enterprises and 48 valid responses were obtained. The results indicate that 67 percentage of SMEs in the sample in Pretoria East have somewhat embraced the adoption of e‐commerce. Retail is the largest industry sector in the sample followed by Service industry with 45.8percentage and 35.4 percentage respectively. The results also indicates that Service sector was at adoption level 2 followed by Retail and others. The results show that only three independent factors namely (relative advantage, competitive pressure, IT knowledge) were statistically significant. Relative advantage emerged as the most important factor influencing the adoption of e‐commerce among SMEs in terms of relative importance. The Chi‐square test indicates that the type of business, occupation level, numbers of employees in the company and academic qualification did influence the adoption levels amongst SMEs whilst how long as owner/manager and gender did not influence the adoption level.