ON THE EXPLANATION OF FACTORS AFFECTING E-COMMERCE ADOPTION

Abstract

The Internet has grown at a remarkable pace since the emergence of the World-Wide Web in the early 1990s. While electronic commerce (e-Commerce) has become an important issue with the growth of the Internet, there has been insufficient empirical research concerning its adoption by Internet users. In this paper, we propose the e-Commerce Adoption Model (e-CAM), which attempts to examine important factors that predict a consumer’s online purchasing behavior. e-CAM integrates the technology acceptance model with the theories of perceived risk to explain the adoption of e-Commerce. Specifically, we examine the impact of the following factors on the consumer’s purchasing behavior: perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, perceived risk with products/services, and perceived risk in the context of online transaction. We test the e-CAM model using the structural equation modeling technique. Most of the causal relationships between the constructs postulated by our model are well supported, accounting for 33.4 percent of the total variance in e-Commerce adoption. In sum, our study finds that all of the antecedent constructs directly and/or indirectly affect the consumer’s adoption of e-Commerce. Therefore, the findings suggest that firms providing products/services through e-Commerce should consider these contextual factors in order to facilitate consumers ’ adoption behavior.