Moreover, as Proposition Two projected, SMEs play an important role for the diffusion of e 

commerce at the industry level. Due to the large number of SMEs, especially in the 

retail/wholesale sector, the benefits deriving from e commerce would not be achievable if only 

large establishments used it. SMEs have shown that they are an innovation friendly group 

implementing new technologies just as fast as large enterprises. Using the given definition of 

SME (25 to 249 employees) and large firms (250 employees and more), size does not 

predetermine the relative efficiency of e commerce usage. In each cluster both  efficient  as well 

as  inefficient  implementations and usages may be observed.  

In contrast to the size of firms, the affiliation to a special industry sector strongly influences the 

diffusion of e commerce solutions (Proposition Three). While the manufacturing industry has 

been using ERP systems and EDI standards for a number of years, as has the banking/insurance 

sector, the availability of Internet based services opens the way for automated business processes 

to be used in the retail/wholesale sector for the first time. Furthermore, the implementation of e 

commerce to improve internal as well as external processes was mentioned as having a 

significant impact in the retail/wholesale sector, while in the banking sector e commerce is seen 

as part of the current problems this sector is laboring under.

As Proposition Four indicates, there is a significant but weak correlation between the number of 

e commerce applications deployed for establishments per industry, and the perceived efficiency 

increases as provided for SMEs. The use of the rank order correlation coefficient reveals a 

monotonic relationship among ordinally scaled data. While the results are very significant in the 

manufacturing and banking and insurance industry, the retail and wholesale industry are 

insignificant in terms of internal processes and staff efficiency, as well as with increasing 

international sales. Nevertheless, the efficient use of e commerce applications seems to be 

positively correlated with the number of technologies deployed, as has already been revealed by 

the DEA analysis. 

The impacts gained, measured on a five point scale, revealed that efficient usage of e commerce 

increases with (and depends on) the increasing complexity of the integrated e commerce 

technology. Although most firms are using e mail or web advertising, the satisfaction, or level of 

impact perceived, depends on the implementation of higher order solutions. This contributes to 

the assumptions formulated in Proposition 2. The DEA analysis, as well as the four quadrant 

model, has shown that the consistent realization of e commerce applications is a necessary 

prerequisite to develop the full benefit of such applications. It may be tempting to cherry pick 

certain applications, but true benefits are gained from the widespread and consistent application 

of all kinds of e commerce technologies. The satisfaction with e commerce as enabling 

technologies relates directly to the complexity of deployed solutions. 

In contrast to other countries, the Internet and with it, the deployed e commerce solutions, are 

used as a complementary channel to distribute products and services and not as a subsidiary 

channel cannibalizing other distribution channels. Therefore, the multi channel strategy to 

infiltrate markets in Germany seems more important than in other countries included in this 

survey.

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