Personalization of E-Commerce Applications in SMEs: Conclusions from an Empirical Study in Switzerland

Personalization of e-commerce applications is an issue that is gaining increasing importance with the advancing maturity of such systems. There is already e-commerce software on the market offering integrated e-shop and personalization functions. However, the available software is too time-consuming and expensive for SMEs. With this in mind we saw a need to investigate the potential for personalization from the particular angle of SMEs. In addition to some theoretical fundamentals of personalization, this paper presents the results of an empirical study. With the help of a survey, we investigated the application potential for personalization tools in Swiss companies. The conclusions show that SMEs are (still) skeptical towards e-commerce applications which use personalization. It furthermore becomes clear that the heterogeneity of organizational and technical conditions impedes the development of standardized tools.