Critical success factors for a competitive advantage in electronic commerce: empirical study in paraguayan companies

Abstract

Electronic commerce has been one of the most active fields of investigation in Information Technology in the last few years. It would be interesting to find out which critical factors keep electronic commerce from achieving success and which factors would be regarded as a sustainable competitive advantage for companies. In this investigation we have developed a model for the achievement of success in electronic commerce based on what is proposed by DeLone and McLean regarding the current model to achieve success in Information Systems, tested by the AMOS (Analysis of Moment Structures), through a sample of 55 Paraguayan companies.  As for the bibliography used, we have performed a meta-analysis study with the purpose of identifying the most relevant journals, with their respective current authors and the indicators that represent the importance to the project. The results have yielded valuable conclusions to the Paraguayan reality as only two of the 10 indentified critical factors for success were detected: “Experts in information technology (IT) and infrastructure” and “Interoperability of the system”.  These are regarded as factors which have been converted into a timely competitive advantage but not into a sustainable competitive advantage through time, due to reasons such as a lack of experts in information technology (IT), particularly regarding the knowledge of electronic commerce and the sluggishness of development of electronic commerce which carries out online activities.