The recent years, small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been shown to contribute significantly to national economies. It was in the 1970s that researchers first began to highlight the critical role of SMEs, not only in maintaining healthy and dynamic economies within industrialized nations, but also in introducing inventions and innovations.The recent emergence of the Internet in general, and the WWW or Web in particular has revolutionized business activities (Abell & Lim, 1996). This is generating new products, and is the driving force behind new production processes, new forms of business organization, new scope for consumers, and new market opportunities. E-commerce is becoming more and more essential as a business tool for organizations in general, and for SMEs in particular, to gain competitive advantage and to access global markets. The online economy introduces unique opportunities to SMEs for open and free trade because it avoids tariffs and tax, while lessening the impact of geographical distances and time, which can serve to separate SMEs from potential opportunity. .There is a need to generate more e-commerce research that could penetrate much deeper into main impending issues pertaining to the SMEs in their potential uptake and use of ecommerce. On the other hand, e-commerce is characterized of being embryonic but growing very fast and fragmented across the different disciplines, which makes the task of capturing its different perspectives a very complex one. In line with the above implications, the first objective of this research aims at capturing the different ecommerce perspectives from the SMEs' point of view, and the second objective aims are capturing the e-commerce perspective from the theoretical and the methodological point of view.

No abstract

No abstract

Despite of remarkable interests in the nature and role of marketing application from servicing perspective, there are limited researches on service branding. By describing four major aspects of service branding, present study studies these aspects and their impacts on service conceived quality and finally it investigates the impact of service conceived quality on customer loyalty. Represented model includes the impact of brand traditional image along with other three impacts, that is, company image, employees' confidence and company's confidence. By using a 100-subject sample of Albania and Macedonia Insurance Company's customers, the analyses show that brand image and company's image have direct and positive impact on service conceived quality while a significant relationship is not seen between company' confidence and employees' confidence with service quality. Finally, the aspects of service brand impacts indirectly on customers' loyalty via impacting on service conceived quality. The positive impact on brand image and company's image on service conceived quality are too important due to the fact these two service brand aspects are highly impacted by external marketing as well as the importance of external marketing and throughout campaigns for insurance company via radio, TV and other mass media. In one hand, since most insurance companies are similar in terms of pro vided services, one can distinguish the special brand of Albanian and Macedonian Insurance in terms of special discounts, discounts on simultaneous usage of several types of insurance, etc. On the other hand, increasing the accessibility to services throug h opening further affiliated branches and full explanations of insurance servicesthat are typically varied and detailedin guiding brochures and notebooks lead into customers' awareness and finally into a separated mindset and a positive and effective service brand for the company.