Adoption of e-Commerce: A decision theoretic framework and an illustrative application

Abstract

Electronic commerce (e-Commerce or EC), in some form or other, is changing the way organizations do their business. Many organizations (banks etc) are forcing their customers to adopt e-Commerce. Others are adopting e-Commerce for competitive necessity. This raises the obvious question: How can organizations adopt appropriate e-Commerce model judiciously? This paper addresses the above research question. We use a decision theoretic framework based on multiple attributes of e-Commerce. Extensive literature review revealed a number of factors or attributes that either act as drivers or barriers of e-Commerce success. A well known decision theoretic approach based on multiple attribute, called analytic hierarchy process (AHP), is used to develop a comprehensive model of e-Commerce adoption. Our framework can be used as a guide to select the appropriate e-Commerce model. Real world data, from EC consultants, have been collected for a hypothetical SME which is embarking on adopting an e-Commerce model. The paper presents the application of the framework for this SME.