Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore small business e-commerce development and usage of the emerging ICT-infrastructure for e-commerce in Sweden. For more than a decade firms in countries with appropriate infrastructures in place have generally been able to exploit internet technologies for business purposes.

Design/methodology/approach: The paper presents the results from a telephone survey on Swedish small businesses. The 160 firms surveyed were independent manufacturing firms in Sweden with a number of employees ranging from ten to 50 and a turnover not surpassing e 10 million. Data analysis was conducted using SPSS.

Findings: The paper presents empirical data on e-commerce development among small businesses in Sweden. The study shows that a significant share of the studied firms have adopted internet technologies, but also that more than 70 per cent of the small businesses in the study have more than five years of experience of e-commerce. The study finds that small businesses in Sweden show remarkably high levels of e-commerce adoption. The study shows strong penetration of web site and e-mail use among small businesses in Sweden, but also that advanced applications are still not broadly applied.

Originality/value: Statistics presented by the OECD have recurrently shown that the Scandinavian countries are in the lead as regards building an ICT infrastructure. Sweden’s leading position in ICT has been confirmed by several studies. Because of scarce resources and lack of knowledge, small businesses are generally known to be lagging in terms of ICT use. This study empirically explores small business e-commerce development in Sweden and contributes to the stream of research aiming at benchmarking e-commerce development