Study on the public market platform's impact on SME in Chile

Abstract

This paper is the outcome of a study that aimed to measure the impact of Chile's Public Market Platform on small and medium enterprises that use this platform to sell their goods and services to the State. Chilecompra, the Chilean agency in charge of managing government procurement, manages this platform. The Public Market "is the largest e-commerce market in Chile with more than 9,5 billion dollars in transactions annually1."This study, based on a perception survey answered by SMEs, measures how using this platform has affected user companies' internal processes, specifically regarding managerial aspects, ICT capacity, training and reliability of platform providers in terms of the integrity and equity of procurement processes with Chilean government agencies. The study refers to the latter as the positive externalities associated with using the platform. For example, only 36% of those surveyed acknowledged that IT has a positive or slightly positive impact on the company, while a mere 20% use electronic invoice. Moreover, training does not seem to have had a significant impact on platform use. However, those surveyed did point out that participating in the Public Market is important for SMEs' business (accounting for 37% of total sales on average).