An investigation of the impact of effective factors on the success of e-commerce in small- and medium-sized companies

Companies and organizations have to attract and retain customers so that they can survive. Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is regarded as an appropriate strategy for marketing, selling and integrating online services which can play a significant role in identifying, obtaining and maintaining customers. E- commerce optimizes and enhances the relationship and communications between the organization, producers, distributors and customers. However, it should be noted that success in e-commerce depends upon determining effective factors in e-commerce. There is a set of effective inside organizational and outside organizational factors in e-commerce which should be taken into consideration. In this study, a model and framework was proposed for specifying the effective factors on e-commerce success. Structural equations with partial least squares (PLS- SEM) was used to investigate and experiment the proposed model. The obtained results based on the collected data from 180 staff employees of the Post Bank(1) in Eastern and Western Azerbaijan indicated that customer satisfaction, the amount of costs, infrastructures and knowledge and information are the effective's factors which have a significant impact on e-commerce success. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.