Adoption of Electronic Commerce by SMEs of Taiwan

Adoption of Electronic Commerce by SMEs of Taiwan

According to survey results of ministry of economy affairs in 2001, the total number of enterprises in Taiwan was 1,091,245 and in terms of scale, there were 1,070,310 SMEs, accounting for 98.08% of all enterprises. But only small percentage has preceded e-commerce strategies. To find out why so slow adoption of electronic commerce by the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Taiwan are objectives of this study. A survey of SMEs, using convenient sampling was conducted within Rogers’ (1995) framework of adoption of innovation plus one extra factor developed by the author. The multiple regressions constructed based on the survey data revealed that relative advantage, complexity, observability and government’s policies stand out as the reasons that affect adoption of electronic commerce by SMEs. This study recommends that to encourage faster adoption with regard to relative advantage and observability, the vendors of electronic commerce ought to provide SMEs with free trial to make them understand the potential benefit of adoption electronic commerce; as for complexity, that is lack of proper human resources, the government should help SMEs to recruit enough IT manpower to proceed the electronic commerce appropriately. Most important, the government may consider offering financial incentives to the SMEs on the lines of those available in some of the countries in the Asia-Pacific.