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ABSTRACT
Most of the research in the area of consumer e-commerce has centered on the factors which attempt to measure shoppers' motivations to adopt and use Internet shopping. This body of research which emanated from the developed countries is now being conducted in countries with emerging and developing economies. While the assumptions are implicit, researchers have tended to ignore the vast differences in market structure between developed economies and emerging or developing, viewing all the e-commerce markets as having similar website characteristics and/or the same level of development. For example, in highly developed markets transactional websites tend to dominate the landscape, though there are still many informational websites. The reasons that transaction sites dominate the marketplace of developed economies are numerous. In a stage process, vendors come to realise the full marketing potential of e-commerce that transactional sites create over the informational sites, while at the same time customers become more accustomed to Internet shopping and completing their purchases in real time, abetted by the convenience of making after-hours purchases. Finally, transactional site shoppers can have their purchases shipped to home or office. The current study suggests that the development stage of the e-commerce market will directly reflect the amount of adoption and usage by the shoppers. To test this proposition, several Internet activity indices and reports were investigated, referenced and cross-checked to ascertain statistical comparisons. World Bank (2013-14) report and other studies indicate that wide differences exist between the developed United Kingdom (UK) and developing Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) e-commerce markets: UK-KSA: 90%-37% e-commerce usage, and 82%-15% e-commerce purchases and show that 59%-14% of SME's using websites in their businesses. Thus, the adoption and usage of e-commerce is related to the market development by SME's that in-turn make Internet services available to consumers.
JEL Classification: O10; O40; O50.
Keywords: E-commerce; SMEs; Saudi Arabia.
1.INTRODUCTION
The concept of e-commerce emerged in the early-1990s with the promise of expanded business operations and advantages for many types of companies. While there was quite a bit of early research on the Internet, not much research was done in the areas comprising the Internet commerce until after many e-commerce organizations went bankrupt during the dotcom-bubble-era of 1998 to 2000. From the carnage created by the many failed...