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Top1. Introduction
The Internet has modernized the way people used to carry out business operations and provided a far-reaching platform to socialize with the real world. Information technology solutions can broadly be defined as a combination of software, hardware, telecommunication, and information management techniques and applications that can be used to create, produce, analyses, process, package, distribute, receive, retrieve, store and interpret information (Barba-Sánchez et al., 2007). E-commerce has created a new platform for organizations to spread awareness about their product and services. Organizations adopting e-commerce technologies have a competitive advantage over the market, making existing companies improve their strategies. E-commerce technology has become more popular in recent years, earning large revenues and better business opportunities. An organization must understand that the emerging era of e-commerce technology attracts a huge percentage of online users. Hence, E-commerce technology adoption can provide a potential profit for the organization to extend its boundaries beyond the traditional walls. In India electronic commerce can be broadly categorized as business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce, business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce, and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce. The convenience of customers to shop 24×7 at home and availability of a wide variety of products with an accurate description with lower prices has provided a large interactive online market (Farag et al., 2007; Childers et al., 2001). Therefore, the implementation of the e-commerce platform involves significant decision-making for policymakers and higher-level management. This study examines the barriers or parameters and identifies the correlation among the parameters in adopting e-commerce technology in India, focusing on small and medium-sized enterprises.
Valmohammadi and Dashti (2016) showed that a “lack of awareness regarding the benefits and nature of e-commerce” is the most prominent barrier to e-commerce implementation. Studies have suggested further examine the dependency among the different barriers and interaction between them. It has been founded that limited research has been done regarding the interaction among the barriers. Therefore, the present study aims to fill the gap in the literature, offering a more comprehensive model determining the interaction between the barriers. An integrated fuzzy DEMATEL approach is employed to perform the qualitative analysis (Bashardoost et al., 2018). Mohan and Ali (2019) concluded that MSMEs plays an indispensable role in the economic development of the nation, and like SMEs, these dynamic business platforms can help the Indian economy to boom at a faster pace; hence existing literature has not led enough attention to the reasons behind Why Indian SMEs are lagging behind other developed economies in adopting digital platforms. Different studies conducted in this context incorporated different barriers in their studies. A total of 15 barrier have been identified in this proposed study. However, any inadequacy in understanding these barriers may also increase the complexity while executing the adoption of E-commerce in the Indian context. Researchers played a vital role in addressing various crucial barriers to evaluate and understand the nitty-gritty while proposing a framework to overcome this problem. The present research framework seeks to attain the objective mentioned as - Understanding and evaluating barriers in the adoption of E-commerce from the Indian perspective. The above mentioned objective has been designed based on the fact that the Indian SMEs are still lagging behind other developed economies in adopting digital platforms (National report on e-commerce development in India, 2019). Hence quite important for SMEs to incorporate E-commerce. Therefore, to resolve this difficulty in the adoption of eCommerce by SME (Indian context. This research raises two analysis questions, as follows:
• What are the barriers need to be considered in the successful adoption of E-commerce in SMEs from the Indian perspective.
• How the causal relations among the identified barriers in the successful adoption of E-commerce in SMEs should be determined?