e-Commerce Adoption and Implementation Challenges for Small Enterprises in Sweden

Small businesses make up for 99.4% of Swedish enterprises and can be benefited by successful implementation of e-commerce. This study finds the challenges that these enterprises face in the adoption and implementation of ecommerce during pre and post adoption phases. Most of the earlier research in the relevant field focuses only on the e-commerce adoption barriers. They fall short of identifying the barriers faced by the adopters of e-commerce in their implementation phase. Therefore, this study finds and classifies these challenges for small enterprises in Sweden. Taking ten small enterprises as case studies, the research first tests an existing model that focuses on pre-adoption phase only and found that some factors are not prevalent in the studied organizations. Then the study explores some post adoption barriers faced by the enterprises that are currently using e-commerce. Lack of time to improve e-commerce activities, synchronization of demand and supply, price war among competitors, need for extensive marketing effort, payment related hazards are explored and identified as post-adoption barriers. Finally, a model has been proposed portraying a complete picture of the challenges faced by small enterprises in adopting and implementing e-commerce in Sweden.