Small Businesses and Digital Platforms

Nishant Chadha, Viswanath Pingali and Daniel Sokol

IIMA Working Papers from Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Research and Publication Department

Abstract: We investigate strategies of small businesses’ usage of digital platforms for advertising and sales. We rely on primary data from a quantitative survey of small business startups, and a few in-depth interviews of small business owners. We find that small firms prefer digital platforms for advertising and sales over conventional methods. As firms grow, while they continue to rely on digital advertising, their preference for conventional advertising (radio, television, etc.) increases. We find a strong correlation between the geographical spread of small firm sales, including exports, and their propensity to use digital platforms. We also find that small businesses multihome on both advertising and sales platforms. Multihoming occurs across established platforms and between established and nascent platforms. Our results enhance the understanding of how small firms rely on platforms and inform the policy debates on platform regulation.

Date: 2023-09-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-ent, nep-ind, nep-pay, nep-reg and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.iima.ac.in/sites/default/files/2023-09/W.P.No.2023-09-01.pdf English Version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iim:iimawp:14704

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IIMA Working Papers from Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Research and Publication Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (respub@iima.ac.in).