Northumbria University

an investigation into the adoption of e-commerce in British small retailing businesses: benefits and issues
Objectives:
1. To gain an understanding of the theories of e-commerce, in particular adopted by small retailing businesses.
2. To evaluate the significances of doing e-commerce in British small retailing businesses;
3. To find out the reasons why e-commerce is needed by British small retailing businesses;
4. To identify the specific types of e-commerce usually adopted by the small sized enterprises;
5. To discover the benefits and opportunities of British small retailing businesses from their e-commerce development;
6. To investigate the key issues and risks arising from doing e-commerce;
7. To appraise the current status and performance of British small business doing e-commerce.

Since last decade, the fast growing information technology gives a great opportunity to small businesses to gain competitive advantages through e-commerce, for example, by using of e-mail. This suggests a suitable starting point for companies to adopt e-commerce. But there are still several issues arising from the implementation of e-commerce. Therefore the author seeks to address what opportunities drive British small business to adopt e-commerce. Further more, the risks of the adoption of e-commerce in small business should be identified clearly. Due to the study areas of realized benefits are natural first steps for small businesses new to e-commerce, the findings from this study are important to both researchers and practitioners for further study. The paper commences with a review of existing literature in this domain and the conceptual framework used as a basis for this study.