The impact of e-commerce on Taiwanese SMEs: marketing and operations effects

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to distinguish the impacts of e-commerce on marketing and operations functions and investigate how these impacts have affected performance of Taiwanese SMEs. We also investigate the moderating roles of size and e-commerce experience of SMEs on the e-commerce impact–performance relationship. We have used resource-based-view of a firm to provide the theoretical underpinning to understand how e-commerce adoption is linked to firm performance. We have conducted a survey and obtained 110 usable responses from Taiwanese SMEs. We first verified our variables to check they get grouped to marketing and operations effects using confirmatory factor analysis. We then identified their influence on performance using regression. Finally, we verified the roles of size and e-commerce experience using moderated regression analysis. Our results show that operations and marketing aspects of e-commerce have strong impacts on performance of SMEs. Size of SMEs, measured using number of employees, moderates the impacts of operations and marketing aspects on performance, while e-commerce experience, measured using the length of time SMEs have adopted e-commerce, does not moderate. Our results will help SMEs in general and Taiwanese SMEs in particular to understand the influence of e-commerce on their performance.