Barriers and Supports to Dost-Assisted MSMEzs in Adopting Onestore.Ph in the Philippines

Abstract

Introduction

Ecommerce and micro, small, medium enterprises (MSME's) play a significant role in economic growth in the Philippines. The Department of Science and Technology developed oneSTore.ph which is an e-commerce platform designed to help DOST-assisted MSME's to market their products, to be globally competitive and to defray from the development cost of an e-commerce site. However, there are still internal and external barriers to adopting e-commerce and needed supportfrom internal and external to the organization. In this dissertation study, the researcher assessed the internal and external barriers together with the internal and external support needed by the DOST-assisted MSME's in adopting oneSTore.ph to fully utilize the developed e-commerce platform.

Methods

Descriptive research was applied in this study using a questionnaire to gather data. There were 220 randomly selected respondents. Frequency and Percentage Distribution, Median, Kruzkal Wallis, and Mann-Whitney Test were utilized as statistical tools.

Results

The majority of the MSME’s who adopted oneSTore.ph were micro-enterprises, sole proprietors and female owners/managers. Lack of skills in e-commerce or oneSTore.ph and more concerns on payment security online were important internal barriers. Infrastructure barriers, Social barriers, and Legal and Regulatory barriers were the highest external barriers in adopting oneStore.ph. To some extent, internal support was provided and to a great extent, external support was provided to MSME’s. There were no significant differences between the assessment of the respondents on the internal barriers and external barriers of DOST-assisted MSME’s in adopting oneStore.ph in terms of Individual and company profile. There were significant differences between the assessment of the respondents on the internal and external support in terms of age, type of business organization, number of stores, number of employees and average annual sales for the last three years.

Discussions

The results demonstrate that infrastructure barriers such as low internet speed in the country, and inadequate infrastructure in the country are needed to improve to fully utilize the e-commerce platform. There must be available information on e-commerce for the MSME's to be familiar with oneSTore.ph. Legal and Regulatory barriers should be improved and provided such as an adequate legal framework for e-commerce, simple procedures and guidelines and suitable software standards.