A research on the applicability of e-commerce at retail trade firms

Nowadays, the significance of information technology is increasingly growing in human life. Being faster and efficient, new methods have been studied to produce more and more high-quality output with low-cost. On this purpose, e-business yields a new perspective for the business world instead of the traditional methods. Meanwhile e-commerce is critically important for companies which are active in private sector. In this thesis, the concepts of e-business and e-commerce are analyzed in detail and the relationship between these concepts is proposed.Since the 90?s, it has been tried constantly to keep up with ?e-transformation? by leaving aside the standard process of doing business. First governments have launched the process of e-government by transferring traditional public services into the electronic media, and then they stimulate firms to start trading in the electronic area. This thesis covers the e-transformation, e-commerce and e-government activities in Turkey in chronological order. As the result of the thesis study, the problems, breakdowns and achievements of e-services in both public and private sector are analyzed. In the light of the composed theoretical information, a survey is conducted covering one thousand firms active in retail industry in order to approach with an empirical view to the proficiency of firms in information technologies, their point of view on e-commerce and their expectations from government about the e-commerce. According to the results of the survey, almost fifty percent of firms are carrying on e-commerce activities at the present. Although they are active in e-commerce sector, they claim that legislation and regulations are inefficient and tangible and educational subventions provided by the government are insufficient. This shows that there is some deficiency in the infrastructure of e-transformation. As a consequence, it is concluded and suggested that real achievement in e-commerce is only possible for a business environment if only the governments entirely completed their e-transformation activities.