scale companies through electronic commerce despite the differences among industrial sectors. The results in Table 5 reveal that the most important impact of electronic commerce is
enhancement of business activities. In addition, issues such as better access to global markets, improvement of customer services, increase of competitiveness, increases in future revenues through creating new products and services, increases in future revenues through creating new products and service, more options provided to customers at cheaper prices, increase of delivery speed, and better inventory performance have provided benefits to companies in their electronic commerce activities. On the other hand, better understanding of customer demands and expectations, better distribution performance, and achievement of more effective knowledge management seem to influence less than the other factors. However, overall all factors being above average indicates that electronic commerce generate some significant effects on SMEs. In fact, electronic commerce implementation has created some positive major impact on areas, which face many problems and limitations. The automotive suppliers industry provides parts to the major industry. Hence, it has a significant value because of its volume of transactions, but limited in terms of its customers. The automotive suppliers industry utilizes the benefits of electronic commerce implementation in order to enhance business, to facilitate business processes, and access to customers.
In Table 6, the importance level of obstacles constraining electronic commerce activities is shown. The companies point out that lack of three dimensional visual, touch effects, and test drives for automobiles and parts is the major obstacle constraining electronic commerce activities. As stated in the previous sections of the study, commodities such as automobile and real estate are not the goods that can be easily purchased because of their value and consumption. Hence, their purchasing process is more complicated and requires longer time as compared to non-durable goods purchased and consumed more frequently. In the light of these circumstances, the situation is quite the same for the products of automotive supplier industry. Even though the model, type, price, and other characteristics of the demanded products are well known by customers and pro- viders, the lack of three dimensional visual, touch
The results in Table 4 indicate that the companies aim to utilize time advantage of
electronic commerce for accessing new markets. In general, SMEs face problems in accessing new markets because of reasons such as limited financial resources, insufficiency of qualified labor, and locality of marketing and distribution systems. Electronic commerce seems to provide advantages to overcome these problems. If compared to traditional commerce, SMEs obtain significant benefits of electronic commerce implementation against large scale companies as they move from local markets to global competition. Indeed, SMEs have acquired important advantages against large