The invasion of e-commerce on SMEs: exploring the impact on the brick-and-mortar experience

This research examines the adoption of e-commerce by SME businesses in Kuwait. It explains what e-commerce is, and how it is influencing SME businesses to shift towards online applications. In addition, it explains in detail how the roles of human factors, technological or financial factors, environmental factors, safety factors, and the lack of brick and mortar experience influence the use and establishment of an e-business. In this research, qualitative analysis was used to measure the above variables by the conducting of ten semi-structured interviews with Kuwaiti SME business owners. The finding of the analyses concluded that the measured variables mentioned above influence the establishment and practice of e-business in Kuwait, which in turn somewhat affects the brick and mortar experience. The results of this research were based on ten semi-structured interviews. The interviewees were selected using snowball sampling and the interviews were conducted over the phone due to COVID-19, which might have introduced research bias. This research will give SME business owners a wider look at the impact of virtual platforms on their businesses and show how they could benefit from this research by reviewing what needs to be changed to achieve successful business management.