Designing a Diagnosis Instrument to Determine e-Commerce Readiness for Micro and Small Enterprises in Rural Areas

Electronic commerce, as a new way of commercialization, is not only a business decision, since not all companies, nor all consumers in a region, are technologically prepared to adopt electronic commerce. To implement this type of trade, companies should carry out a diagnostic study, both to know if the technological resources are available internally, and to determine if the potential clients are also ready and willing to use the channel. From this perspective, this work seeks to design an instrument that allows diagnosing the e-Commerce readiness of micro and small businesses, and their potential consumers in rural areas. An iterative process to create the diagnosis instruments was used.  It involved iterations of design and evaluation stages. Academic experts with extensive experience in instrument design carried out the first evaluation; the second iteration was evaluated in a pilot field study where 6 companies and 10 consumers from similar regions participated. Finally, in a case study in the canton of Río Cuarto de Alajuela, 29 companies and 261 consumers from the region participated in this study. The diagnosis highlights that most of these companies express that they are not technologically prepared to implement e-commerce, while most of the participating consumers indicated that they do feel technologically prepared to use these platforms.