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.
Tourism is a dream factory. Destinations are the theatres in which tourism dreams are brought to life, moulded into unifying themes and stage managed as events." Keller, 2005 What are potential sources of growth in tourism? Possible answers include increasing the share of the sector, in particular the ratio of consumer expenses on tourism services and products (1), or increasing the relative market share of a region vis -a vis other regions (2). Moreover the proliferation of ICT in tourism has facilitated the growth of related employment in the ICT sector. The reflection on business models addresses all issues to some degree: the focus on " value propositions" highlights the attractiveness of tourism products to consumers. However, an analysis of the influence of specific value propositions on consumer behavior and more specifically their willingness to allocate an increasing part of their budget to tourism services is beyond the scope of this analysis.As little data are available about the impact of ICT and E-Marketing in tourism, this paper will focus on anecdotal evidence and strategic reasoning.
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