A Longitudinal Study of Expectations in Small Business Internet Commerce

This paper examines the change in expectation among a group of small Australian firms who participate in Small Business Internet Commerce (SBIC) over a twenty-month period. Essentially, we found that small firms online believed the Internet is important in terms of competitiveness, although some of the early expectations about SBIC’s ability to generate instant competitive advantage had started to wane. The most useful attributes of the Internet were information gathering and time-savings, while results on advertising and sales were less encouraging. Internet marketing effectiveness was found to be industry-sectordependent.