A Conceptual Investigation of the E-commerce Industry Electronic commerce, or activities that directly support commerce by means of electronic (networked) connections , is redefining the very foundations of competitiveness in terms of information content and information delivery mechanisms. Flows of information over international networks have created an electronic marketspace [8] of firms that...

Previous efforts in electronic commerce (e-commerce) research in developing countries shows that there is an acute lack of theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence to understand how developing country firms realize electronic commerce benefits amidst their national constraints. This paper sets out to develop a theoretically abstracted but contextually grounded model of how developing count...

Because small and medium sized businesses form the basis of the national economy, creating conditions under which they can maintain stable growth in a more competitive environment is a principal challenge for continuous economic growth. Due to a lack of managerial resources in practice, however, they experience difficulties in raising funds and accessing the financial market. On the other hand,...

Opportunities coming from electronic commerce provide interesting support options for the agrifood sector. However, due to the product specific information asymmetry in the agrifood sector, the anonymity of the medium creates a lack of trust increasing transaction costs to engage in e-commerce. This paper develops a trust model for electronic commerce in the agrifood industry allowing for the a...

This paper examines the extent to which companies in various industries are using the World Wide Web and its associated technologies to conduct retail business. Using the framework of an Electronic Commerce Architecture (ECA), a variety of commercial Web sites are analyzed to determine which commerce processes are being supported online in each industry and each type of industry. The results of...

A number of reference models have been proposed to facilitate the development of electronic commerce systems and applications. A comparative analysis of existing models should be the first step in selecting the right foundation for the system being developed. This paper presents some results of an analysis of four among the well known reference models for electronic commerce, primarily from the...

It is a well-known problem that small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) have difficulty to participate in electronic commerce. In particular, the SME participation in business-to-business electronic commerce is seriously lagging behind compared to the very active participation of large companies. We discuss several barriers that could explain why SMEs have problems to participate in electronic...

While the concept of economic development has been widely used to understand the health and wealth of countries, it is accepted that the access to the internet for electronic commerce transactions enable generation in income and improvements in lives. However, with the rise of disparities in income within countries, electronic commerce opportunities can be limited to the few with internet acces...