The effect of small business clusters in prioritising barriers to e-commerce adoption in regional SMEs

This paper presents a study of Swedish regional small businesses which investigated the barriers to E-commerce adoption (amongst other things). The aim of the paper is twofold: to examine the correlation between barriers to E-commerce adoption in order to identify underlying factors: and to determine whether these differ between SMEs that are members of a small business cluster and SMEs that are not. The paper begins by examining the nature of SMEs and identifying features that are unique to SMEs. A discussion of barriers to E-commerce adoption based on previous research is then presented and the barriers are mapped to the unique SME features. The paper will then briefly examine the role of small business clusters in the adoption of E-commerce. This is followed by a correlation and factor analysis of the two sets of data and a discussion of the results. Finally, the limitations of the study are presented and conclusions drawn.