evaluation of influential factors on development of e-commerce: case of tehran smes

abstract: this paper investigates the factors accelerating smes' adoption of e-commerce. initially we proposed a model that included three categories of factors including external environmental factors, internal environmental factors and technology specifications. in addition, we proposed ecommerce adoption stages in two levels of early adoption and institutionalization. based on surveying 304 smes we tested the proposed model and concluded that the external environmental factors can be divided by two main categories of remote environmental factors and industry level factors. the relations between criteria and latent variables are discussed and explained.