O e-commerce das micro e pequenas empresas varejistas de Salvador: entraves e contribuições dos correios para o crescimento da atividade

Abstract

Contemporary society witnesses the emergence of new personal, commercial and governmental relationships which are electronically established driven by information and communication technologies (ICTs), in the wake of the expansion of the Internet. In this new socio-economic and cultural configuration, information and data are made available and transmitted even in large geographic distances in an efficient manner allowing an unlimited supply of products and services such as the distance education, e-banking and business transactions online called electronic commerce or e-commerce. In fact, the ICTs and the Internet have changed the acts of sales and purchases of services and products, making companies, even those of smaller size, increasingly adopt the channels web in their digital business since they provide them larger territorial scope of action with much lower interaction costs compared to the usual channels. The Brazilian Post Office Company has played an important role in the expansion of e commerce becoming in the case of small commodities the most viable option of distribution. Understanding the importance of the retail trade for the economy of Salvador, the central goal proposed in this research resides in analyzing the performance of the micro and small retail companies of Salvador in the e-commerce segment so as to know the contribution of the services offered by the Post Office Company, To make this objective feasible a documental, bibliographic, and data collection survey has been conducted aiming to substantiate the theory aiming the final evaluation of the research. As for the method the research can be classified as being deductive and exploratory as well. Data collection has been performed through the application of questionnaires to MPEs of the retail segment of Salvador via the forms of Google forms forwarded to three lists of e-mails provided by the Post Office Company, the Chamber of Shopkeepers of Salvador (CDL), and the Commercial Board of the State of Bahia (JUCEB) in order to obtain a sample according to Classic Sampling Techniques and statistical inference. The conclusion was that although being the largest logistic service provider used by that group of companies, the Post Office Company still offers an incipient response to the already consolidated demand of the transactions of the e-commerce