Dreams Come True? An Exploratory Study of Entrepreneurs Running Business through Online Stores in Taiwan

CHU, Szu-Hao (2011) Dreams Come True? An Exploratory Study of Entrepreneurs Running Business through Online Stores in Taiwan. [Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)] (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Abstract

The soaring growth of B2C online shopping in Taiwan has been boosted through increasing prevalence of broadband use in the last decade. Previously, only large scale companies can afford the immense expenditures on website establishment and maintenance. However, portal operators such as Yahoo! and eBay provide platforms with constructed and well-organized functions for perspective entrepreneurs with less capital to fulfill their dreams -- running own business. An ongoing phenomenon reveals a message that massively fluctuating profitability, from over NT$100 million to report a loss, within online entrepreneurial ventures on those platforms. Although there is a wide range of study looking at entrepreneurship and e-commerce, it is argued that there is little about entrepreneurs in the online shopping industry. In fact, there is rather less investigation on the industry in Taiwan, especially in SMEs sector. Hence, the management project aims to explore roles entrepreneurial traits play in determinants of running a successful online store. Furthermore, the project implements semi-structured in-depth interviews with Taiwanese participants of different profitability to gather rich insights through comparison and contrast in order to generalize crucial factors in achieving entrepreneurial success. With the interpretive method, a conceptual map collecting those crucial factors demonstrates a more integrative realization. Likewise, lessons are learned from the literature review that some issues cause impacts on the development of the industry in Taiwan. To take all the finding into account, managerial implications are thus proposed to help existing and subsequent entrepreneurs to facilitate adaption of e-commerce environment, mitigate uncertainty of startup, and, eventually, augment profit-making possibility.

Item Type: Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)
Depositing User: EP, Services
Date Deposited: 10 Nov 2011 15:03
Last Modified: 29 Dec 2017 08:50
URI: https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/24867

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