The assessment of B2B e-commerce stage of growth for SMEs in Malaysia / Mohd Talmizie Amron

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) should realize the potential benefits of E Commerce technologies in increasing the business productivity and competitiveness in the largest market. Hence, many SMEs have implemented B2B E-Commerce to their company daily operation to ensure that they can compete with other giant businesses. To indicate the E-Commerce implementation, stages of growth model has been developed and it's the most popular approach used for B2B strategy development. Thus this paper wants to investigate the factors that influence SMEs to implement B2B E-Commerce. Survey was the main instrument for the study and responded by 31 companies that implemented B2B E-Commerce for at least three years. This study was a proposed a conceptual growth model which can be used to assess the stage of growth of SMEs in Malaysia. The four stages of growth was adopted from Chan and Swatman (2004) is used in this study; (i) initial E Commerce, (ii) centralized initiative E-Commerce, (iii) looking inward for benefits, and (iv) global E-Commerce. Data analysis was conducted by employing descriptive analysis, reliability analysis, Pearson correlation analysis and T-Test analysis. At the end of the study, eight factors was identified as an influence factor that determined the stage of growth of SMEs in B2B E-Commerce implementation; (i) understanding, (ii) technology strategy, (iii) technology management, (iv) global competitiveness, (v) innovation, (vi) communication, (vii) industry, and (viii) government. The finding also indicated the implementation stage for overall Malaysia SMEs was in Stage 3 (looking inward for benefits). For the future research, recommended to extend their research by investigating other factors with more indicators and also extend to other industry.