Virtual Trade Zone as a Driver of Sustainable Entrepreneurship. Case: Chamber of Commerce and Industries of Azogues

Abstract

The pandemic caused by the outbreak of COVID-19 at the end of 2019, triggered a lot of actions and constraints including the complete lockdown and border closure affecting in a significant way business and commerce around the world. This produced in Ecuador an important closure of enterprises and sales decline, impacting the national economy. The purpose of this article is to reflect the main characteristics of the members of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Azogues in
terms of the effects generated by the pandemic and as a complement to put forward some actions for the commercial reactivation of this sector. For this purpose, an information survey was developed through structured surveys consisting of
46 questions in which issues of characterization of the company, effects of the pandemic in economic, commercial, advertising and productive areas were addressed, as well as their recovery expectations of the industry as well as of the company itself. Among the main results, it was obtained that the largest proportion of partners (49%) has a geographical sales scope at the local level and only 6% reaches international customers. Regarding the perception of the behavior of the inflow of customers, 68% considered that it has decreased; 24% indicated that the inflow has increased, while the remaining 8%
considered that it has remained. 84% of the partners feel that sales had decreased compared to the historical behavior. Finally, the main expectation of companies is to recover the level of sales they had prior to the health emergency. An important
finding is that the reactivation strategies should guide their efforts to expand the potential market not only at the local, regional and why not, on an international level, in addition to strengthen the technological distribution channels.