How Cross-Border E-Commerce Empowers the Internationalization of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises: Mechanisms, Constraints and Optimization Paths

Abstract

Digital technologies and platform economies are changing how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) enter international markets. Based on transaction cost theory, the resource-based view and absorptive capacity theory, this paper explains how cross-border e-commerce empowers SME internationalization. The study argues that platform traffic, transaction data, logistics services, digital finance, compliance tools and public services reduce market-entry costs and partly compensate for SME resource constraints. Yet these external resources do not automatically become international capabilities. Their effects depend on digital absorptive capacity, namely the ability to acquire, assimilate, transform and exploit platform-based information. Cross-border e-commerce works through three mechanisms: transaction cost reduction and market expansion, ecological resource compensation, and capability upgrading driven by data feedback and compliance pressure. The paper identifies platform dependence, weak control over customer data, logistics pressure, supply-chain fragility and rising overseas compliance costs as major constraints, and proposes optimization paths centered on lightweight data systems, differentiated platform deployment, shared service infrastructure and whole-process compliance management.