A Qualitative Study on Business Resilience and E-Commerce Growth in Oman SMEs Context

The recent pandemic has impacted numerous aspects of business, including Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs ‘) operations, growth, and sales. This study aims to show that SMEs need capabilities and strategies with resilience and e-commerce growth to respond to crises, particularly in the Oman context. This study argues that resilience is a process and growth strategy changes, particularly during the post-pandemic period. A snowball sampling method was used, and 11 participants joined the focus group discussion via an online platform (MS Teams). Through a thematic analysis, this inductive study examines business resilience and e-commerce growth strategies in response to economic crises. The study's findings demonstrated that resilience and e-commerce growth are essential, and entrepreneurs could use them to avoid misleading strategies that could lead to failure. Moreover, the digital imperatives could speed up business resilience and growth processes in the emerging digital economy. A conceptual model based on resilience and e-commerce growth for business sustain ability is developed based on qualitative analysis. The model's uniqueness is that developing resilience is a bottom-line strategy for business sustainability, meaning businesses must develop a resilience strategy for digital transformation (e-commerce). Thus, researchers claim resilience is the first step in building business sustainability. In future, an empirical study can be conducted to test the influence of business resilience strategy on business sustainability via e-commerce by applying a quantitative approach. The study's contribution is that resilience and e-commerce growth for Oman SMEs can be described as an adaptation strategy for business sustainability.