Research on drivers for e-commerce by Belgian SMEs and sales funnel generation

Abstract

For our In-Company project we worked for the company Storesquare, who developed a new concept named Streetrabbits. Since students walked around in cities conducting surveys, this concept is a combination of market research and project management as some leadership and organizational skills were tested while launching it. Also, an entrepreneurial mindset was desirable in order to come up with new ideas and to tackle practical and logistic problems. The purpose of our assignment was twofold: on one hand we had to gather a significant amount of data from merchants in Flanders to see what stages have been reached regarding their e-commerce activities. By analyzing this data, we came up with meaningful insights. On the other hand, we had to test whether this new market research approach can be made more efficiently and if it is scalable in other circumstances like smaller cities or villages. In order to guide us on our way, an initial survey was given by Storesquare but was soon modified to improve the quality. We conducted 283 surveys from 1.105 stores who were visited in Roeselare and Ghent. However, our project got a new dimension whereas 122 surveys were filled in through an e-mail campaign where fashion stores in Flanders were targeted. A key take-away is that there are a lot of misconceptions at SMEs in Ghent and Roeselare regarding the behaviour of their customers. Out of the SMEs that had no online presence, almost half of the respondents justified this by assuming that their customers were not online as well. In Ghent, 38% of SMEs claimed that their customers did not shop online. Another misconception that was identified, using a logistic regression that modelled the probability of an SME engaging in e-commerce, was the size of the cost that are associated with engaging in e-commerce. As a proxy for the cost associated with engaging in e-commerce, an estimate was asked for the cost of the delivery of a package of 5kg. Store owners who estimated this cost between 4 and 7 euro were 44% less likely to engage in e-commerce compared to the store owners that expected sending a package costs less than 4 euro. For the group of store owners that expected this to cost more than 11 euro, the probability of engaging in e-commerce even dropped by 88% compared to the group that estimated this to cost less than 4 euro. We can conclude that, in general, the costs that are associated with e-commerce are being overestimated and the online presence of the customers of SMEs are being underestimated by the SME. Since our model indicates that these beliefs have a very substantial effect on the probability of engaging in e-commerce, we can conclude that there is great potential for Storesquare in creating awareness among SMEs regarding the actual costs associated with ecommerce and customer behaviour. Furthermore, this research has investigated how different attributes affect willingness-to-pay for e-commerce and the probability of engaging in e-commerce. This research indicates a positive, statistically significant relation between willingness-to-pay as well as the probability of engaging in e-commerce on one hand and tech savviness and the number of employees on the other hand. A negative relation between the age of the firm and the probability of engaging in e-commerce was confirmed as well. A very specific and in-depth explanation of the construction of our approach and the magnitude of the relations can be found in this research.