Applying E-Commerce on Small Medium Enterprise A Case Study for Saudi Perfumes Cosmetics Retailer in KSA

Abstract

Electronic commerce has been reshaping the aspects of businesses and social life over this period of years. This is made possible with the constant innovation of information system (e.g. website, mobile application) and the global computer network (i.e. internet). There are a number of studies that emphasize on the benefits of adapting this strategy. However, though the benefits of this strategy may well overshadow the issues. The adoption of this strategy is not widely used for the small medium enterprise, opposed to large enterprise. Hence, this research study aims to underline the value and provide recommended guide for applying e- commerce for an small medium enterprise (SME) company. Saudi Perfumes & Cosmetics company located in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) was adapted as the case study. Quantitative research methodology was adopted as the primary techniques using online survey, alongside sources from books, articles, journals and web contents are used as the secondary data. It was found that the company is facing various issues when using direct selling method (e.g. time consuming, difficulty to understand) and the respondents from this survey believes that applying e-commerce would help to resolve this issues. It was concluded that using an off the shelf application provided by Shopify service is the best option. This is given the rationale of having the software provided by the service provider to support both web and mobile application in a single developed application. Therefore, saving cost and development time.