E-commerce for SMEs

Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) play a critical role in Sri Lanka’s economy; be it job creation, entrepreneurship or income generation. In our village, Galenbindunuwewa, SME is an important source of livelihood, especially for the women. Many of these women use local raw materials to produce various handicrafts that are both elegant, and innovative. Raw materials used include rush, watakeya, thin fibered outer coverings of plantain trees, ola leaves and palmyra leaves. As these rural SME’s use local resources and can contribute towards improving the socio-economic conditions of the villagers, they are a sustainable solution to addressing the national development goal for these areas.However, one of the greatest challenges faced by this sector is difficulty in marketing their goods, both domestically and internationally. Many of the entrepreneurs, due to their ignorance of value addition, consumer demand and/or market price, are not able to compete in effectively in today’s market. As such, in most cases, they end up selling their goods at a price that is a fraction of the actual retail price. Since the revenue generated from these sales is not sufficient to sustain operations, many entrepreneurs are forced to scale down production, or shut it down completely. With this project, we hope to help our SMEs increase their visibility both locally and internationally, with the use the online catalog, osCommerce.