Impact of the E-Commerce on Business Pressures in Jordanian SMEs

Organizations today are faced with massive globalization, demanding customers with rapidly changing desires, shrinking response time, shrinking product lifecycles and demanding employees. This requires organizations to become fast, flexible, and participative and focused on customers, competition, teams, time and process. To respond to these forces, it is important to adopt a e-commerce in SMEs. In most developed countries SMEs constitute a highly dynamic and important sector of the economic activity that, nevertheless, has to deal with high competitive pressures and scarcity of resources. Information and communication technologies (ICT) offer SMEs significant opportunities to grow and to compete in the current business environment. This study aims to determine the current level of e-commerce adoption by SMEs in Jordan and clarifies the major business pressures facing organizations. Moreover, it gives a clarification of how e-commerce responses to these pressures. This was achieved by circulating a questionnaire to test the perception of e-commerce benefits and e-commerce adoption levels among SMEs from various sectors in Jordan and applying Turban model on SMEs in Jordanian environment. As such, it is required to help SMEs in raising electronic commerce and benefiting increasingly from e-commerce. It goes further to provide SMEs with business services that could make their trading activities. This study also elucidates these expected benefits from e-commerce and compares them with traditional SMEs to encourage all organizations to adopt and use of e-commerce in their businesses to remain competitive in rapidly changing environment. The results of this study indicate that even though a majority of respondents use e-commerce in the business activities and have their own Web site. Many respondents believed that a reduction in business pressures was a result of e-commerce adoption. In addition, external factors, such as customers and competitors had influence on the decision to adopt e-commerce.