The study on critical success factors of e-commerce entrepreneurs: The case in HCMC
Abstract
Along with the development of word economy, more and more people become self-employed. It is realized that entrepreneurship has a positive influence on the economic growth of a country. Moreover, it is important to apply successfully advance technology to keep the growing economy more sustainable so that e-commerce along with entrepreneurship is now the new force which plays an important role in contributing the wealth creation and economic growth of a country. This study was designed to explore the critical success factors (CSFs) of e-commerce entrepreneur in Ho Chi Minh City. It also discovered the challenges they faced to become successful e-commerce entrepreneur. The interviews were conducted to six selected e-commerce entrepreneur by the semi-structure approach. The interview guide was designed in open questions asking about three groups of factors: founder’s factors, e-business factors, and external factors to orient the study toward the research objective. Furthermore, participant observation was applied to get more insights in respondents’ context. After collected, data were analysis as consisting of three concurrent flows of activities: data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing. The ―start list‖ of codes was created as the start point.
The results found in this study show that age, education, experience as an employee, financial experience, available financial sources, networking are CSFs found belong to group of founder’s factors. In group of e-business factor, all of four factors: reliability, ease of use, responsiveness and self-service confirmed as CSFs. About the group of external factors, market orientation and local policies/attitudes are concluded as CSFs. Based on the findings, recommendations were made toward e-commerce entrepreneur, the organization for e-commerce entrepreneur and policymakers.