To test the claim made in Proposition Four, the correlations between the number of e commerce 

applications deployed (e commerce deployment) and the positive impact or efficient use on the 

industry level (impact of doing business online) based on a Spearman significance test is 

provided (Table 26). For calculation only, the values for SMEs in four countries analyzed are 

considered (Denmark, France, Germany, and the US). The correlations between the number of e 

commerce applications used per firm in an industry in the rows and the efficiency increase, 

represented as positive impacts in the columns, are calculated. 

TABLE 26  Number of e commerce solutions deployed correlated with positive impacts and 

efficiency gains for SMEs in Denmark, France, Germany and the US 

 E commerce 

E commerce 

E commerce 

deployment 

deployment 

deployment 

Manufacturing

Retail/ 

Banking/ 

(N=152)

Wholesale 

Insurance 

(N=151)

(N=155) 

Internal processes more efficient 

.299** 

.114 

.273** 

Staff productivity increased 

.371** 

.091 

.319** 

Sales 

increased 

.263** .397** .486** 

Sales 

area 

widened 

.474** .357** .390** 

Customer service improved 

.378** 

.251** 

.321** 

International sales increased 

.381** 

.095 

.303** 

Procurement costs decreased 

.432** 

.207* 

.366** 

Inventory costs decreased 

.389** 

.233** 

.241** 

Suppliers coordination improved 

.424** 

.300** 

.414** 

Competitive position improved 

.469** 

.211* 

.449** 

Legend: ** p<.01, * p<.05 

Source:  CRITO Global E Commerce Survey, 2002; unweighted sample.

CONCLUSION 

The survey data have shown that the diffusion of  state of the art  e commerce technologies has 

reached a high level. Analogous to the broad usage of e commerce applications, the importance 

of inhibiting factors in Germany was reported to be below the global average. This seems to be 

an excellent prerequisite for the implementation and usage of forthcoming technologies such as 

m commerce and location based services, web services and others to overcome former manual 

processes towards machine to machine based services or decentralized supply chain 

management to avoid bull whip effects.  

Although broad diffusion of e commerce technologies was observed, the intensity of usage must 

be widened to make additional manual fax or telephone based transactions obsolete. As stated in 

Proposition One, the close international trade connections of all investigated German industries 

is an important driver for the diffusion of standardized electronic transactions, especially to 

overcome language barriers. On the other hand, e commerce was overall not such an important 

driver due to the already competitive and efficient international market position of German 

enterprises when compared to the results of the global survey.

46