engleski

E-commerce Obstacles in Small and Medium European Enterprises

Digital access has become seamless in recent decade, and nowadays it becomes present in almost every aspect of business and everyday way of life. E-commerce changed the way people shop and chose products, enabling better services to clients and increasing profitability of enterprises. However, e- commerce customers are faced with numerous difficulties related to their activities, e.g. lacking product information, aggressive advertising, problems with return policies and attack to privacy and thus decrease of trust. On the other side, enterprises also deal with e-commerce obstacles in the area of employee IT knowledge and technical readiness, strategic orientation toward IT and management support. This paper focuses on the analysis of e- commerce obstacles in selected European countries in 2017, encountered by small and medium enterprises. In order to investigate if there are significant differences across selected European countries, the non- hierarchical cluster analysis was conducted in order to group countries into homogenous clusters. Results indicate that small and medium enterprises from countries which are less developed deal with more difficulties on e-commerce. Therefore, digital divide among European countries plays an important role in e-commerce trade, while enterprises from countries, which are leaders in information technology, face fewer difficulties, related to e-commerce.

e-commerce, cluster analysis, small enterprises, medium enterprises, European countries

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