Mini Market: Information Technology Based Support Tool for Small and Medium Scale Enterprises in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) play a crucial role in developing countries such as Sri Lanka in growth of an economy. Recently online platforms are being extensively used by SMEs for both marketing and selling items. In a context of keen competition among the online selling platforms, sellers are increasingly feeling the pressure for improving their sales and marketing strategies. When investigating existing problems of SMEs, we were able to find they do not have proper guidance to improve their own business. Simply, the SMEs cannot identify their own marketing level among the other competitors, they haven't any suitable guidelines to identify how they can improve their own market and they have to use manual reports to get their own sales details for visualizing their marketing level where they waste their valuable time and money for visualizing sales market outcomes. In consideration of this, we propose a web system, that examines the effects of three categories in this system, i.e. Seller trustworthiness, analyze customer's emotions, feelings, thoughts, and opinions through Social media (Facebook) and sales prediction component. This system facilitates a multiple seller platform, where they can dynamically manage virtual shop inside this platform. It increases their stability and it will provide directions to overcome economic and unemployment barriers in our country. The results support our research hypotheses partially. The findings of this study are expected to provide some suggestions for sellers on promote and improve of their sales