Small Medium Enterprise (SME) is one of the fastest growing sectors in our economy system. The growth is indicated by numbers of SME players that is consistently growing each year. The adoption of social media also becomes significant factor affecting the growth of SME. Only by using their smartphone device, they can easily sell products to netizen by using their social media account for free. However, using social media as their only marketplace is not enough. To be able to competitively compete with bigger enterprises, SME players should be able to improve their quality using mobile technology. Thus, this study is aimed to map the SME readiness for mobile.
We have surveyed 100 respondents who have online shop and actively have any transactions with their customer every day. The scale of our survey is nationwide with the range of age as 17-45 years old, and the composition of respondents as 38% male and 62% female. Moreover, in this study, SME refers to the small-medium scale enterprise that has less than 100 employees.
As we previously mentioned, the composition of respondent in this study is dominated by female. The domination is considered as logical since Indonesian SME is mostly owned by female in the age of 20-25 years old. Besides being famous of their “shopaholic”, female also actively earn by their entrepreneurship activities. Regarding the location of the SME online shop, Java Island is still considered as the main area of their business. Most SME online shop is located in West Java, Jakarta, Central Java, Yogyakarta, and East Java. The expensive cost of the shipping fee from outside Java is considered as an important factor to understand this phenomenon. Instead of selling and shipping their products from the outside Java, they tend to sell their products in online shop by drop ship basis.
Regarding their choices of place to sell their products, most respondent choose Facebook, online marketplace (i.e. Blibli, Tokopedia, Kaskus, Berrybenka, etc.), and Instagram. However, there is significant difference between male and female SME owners regarding their chosen medium to sell. Male SME owners tend to sell their products in online marketplace and Facebook, while female SME owners tend to sell their products in Facebook and Instagram.
Differences between male and female SME owners also could be found in their tendency of selling products. Male SME owners mostly sell gadget, while female SME owners mostly sell fashion products.
Regarding their chosen medium to communicate with customers, numbers of instant messaging applications become the most favourite channel. They mostly communicate using BBM, WhatsApp, LINE, SMS, and Facebook Messenger. Interestingly, male SME owners tend to be finer with phone calling with their customers, while female SME owners are not.
Concerning the number of employment as the basic characteristic of SME, we asked our respondents about their employee. Surprisingly, Indonesian SME owners tend to do all the works by themselves. Most of the SME owners do not have any employee, while only few of them have less than ten employees.
Understanding SME readiness about mobile could also be explored by asking them about their medium to sell product besides social media. Sadly, only 6% of SME owners have website for their own store and most of them are men.
Lack numbers of SME who have their own website or application is caused by several challenges. For female SME owners, limited budget to build the website or application is considered as the main challenge. In other hand, though SME website mostly owned by male, but they tend to consider website or application for their store as unimportant.
Although male SME owners tend to consider that having website as unimportant, but both male and female SME owners ever want to have website for their own shop in the future. They are strongly believe that having website can positively contribute to their business activities.
They believe that investing in website could enhance their representativeness and trustworthiness. Having website also enables them to handle transaction easily. At last, they want to attract more customers by having website for their own.
Our final question asked about the most important feature if SME owners have website or application for their stores. Surprisingly, the consideration between male and female SME owners once again shows any differences. Male SME owners consider online payment, shopping cart, and chat with customer as the most important features. In other hand, female SME owners consider chat with customer, shopping cart, and online payment as important.
For more detail you can download XLS report at the button below. JAKPAT report consists of 3 parts which are 1) Respondent Profile, 2) Crosstabulation for each question and 3) Raw Data. Respondent profile shows you demographic profiles ( gender,age range, location by province, and monthly spending). Cross tabulation enables you to define different demographic segment preference on each answer.
Click the icon to download XLS report (Bahasa)
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