E-Commerce and Australian Small Businesses Essay by Peter Pen

This paper explains that e-commerce facilitates the emergence of new small businesses as solely e-commerce-based entering the business world as a virtual companies and traders, because the use of the internet reduces the monetary investment needed for real estate, staffing and other associated costs associated with a "brick and mortar" company. The author points out that the internet enables information, services and value to be transferred seamlessly around the globe; thereby, e-commerce enables small and medium-sized firms to participate in international trade and for small and large companies to have equal access to this medium. The paper relates that e-commerce has obvious implications for the internationalization of Australian business, specifically on small businesses and the Australian economy as a whole, which otherwise is isolated physically from the main global centers of commerce.