Effect of e-commerce platforms towards increasing merchant's income in Malaysia

Abstract

In 2018, 'Hootsuite' and 'We Are Social' have reported in their Digital Report that Malaysian Internet users had increased to 25.08 million users, representing 79% of Malaysian population. However, some reports indicate that even with the enhancement of digital technology, many merchants are still not using any e-commerce platform and being sceptic about it. With the pervasive increase of the Internet users, many other reports had been published to understand the relationship between e-commerce and the increasing of merchants' income. Therefore, the objective of this research is to study the involvement of Malaysian merchants in e-commerce platforms. A sample of 1060 respondents had been selected randomly across Malaysia to participate in this research by answering a set of survey questions given online. In general, the results show that many merchants have realized the existence of e-commerce and they are familiar with it. However, they have only been utilizing it for purchasing goods and services. On the other hand, a few numbers of Malaysian merchants do engage with some type of e-commerce platforms to operate their businesses. In addition, the research is performed to identify the impact of using e-commerce on Malaysian merchants' income.