Abdul R. Ashraf

The Application of the Technology Acceptance Model Under Different Cultural Contexts: The Case of Online Shopping Adoption

Global usage of the Internet has increased remarkably in the past few decades, thus necessitating a better understanding of e-commerce adoption across cultures. Against this backdrop, this study contributes to the existing technology adoption and acceptance literature in the following ways. First, the authors develop an extended technology acceptance model that incorporates trust and perceived behavioral control and examine it in settings outside the United States to better understand the adoption of e-commerce across cultures. Contrary to the authors’ expectations, the predictive power of the technology acceptance model seems robust and holds true for both Pakistan and Canada, despite some noteworthy differences between the two cultures. Second, although the importance of perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness on consumers’ intentions to shop online was validated across both cultures, the results highlight the complex relationships between perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and intention to adopt in each country. The authors offer suggestions to technology managers and e-retailers regarding navigating through new technology and e-commerce adoption under various cultural contexts.

The Role of M-Commerce Readiness in Emerging and Developed Markets

Although mobile commerce (m-commerce) growth provides ample potential for retailers around the globe, several studies have shown that it has failed to attract potential customers across different countries. This study advances the literature by comparing m-commerce customers’ behavioral intentions and actual behaviors using data from 812 m-commerce users across four countries (Australia, India, the United States, and Pakistan). This context offers a unique opportunity for understanding how m-commerce consumers’ behaviors differ across disparate national markets. The authors propose a conceptual framework linking m-commerce users’ behaviors (intentions and actual usages) to key drivers (ubiquity and habit), and they develop hypotheses about the moderating roles of m-commerce readiness and habit in these linkages. The results reveal important asymmetries between m-commerce readiness stage and between habit: users at an early m-commerce readiness stage assign more importance to ubiquity relative to habit in influencing purchase intentions, whereas the opposite is true for the users who are at an advanced stage. Habit moderates the influence of ubiquity such that its importance in determining intention decreases as the behavior in question takes a more habitual nature. The authors outline how m-retailers operating across developed and developing countries should adapt their marketing strategies to customers at different m-commerce readiness stages.

Adoption of Online Shopping: A Technology Acceptance Perspective

Use of the Internet has increased remarkably in the past few decades and, therefore, has created a need to better understand the adoption of e-commerce across different cultures. Our study makes a significant contribution in different ways. First, an extended technology acceptance model (TAM) was developed and validated in an international setting, other than the U.S., in order to better understand the adoption of e-commerce across different cultures. This study extends McCoy et al. (2007) and Straub et al. (1997) work by validating TAM in the Pakistani culture. Contrary to our expectation, the predictive power of TAM seems robust and holds for both Pakistan and Canada. Second, the importance of perceived ease of use (PEOU) to intention to shop online was validated across the two cultures. The results of this study clarify an important issue in TAM studies, namely, when and why PEOU is important and influences intention to use a system (Gefen and Straub 2000; Keil et al. 1995). PEOU is more important than perceived usefulness (PU) in motivating users to accept a technology at the early adoption stage and its importance diminishes as users become familiar with the system. Practitioners, who might have confusions regarding the importance of PEOU due to previous TAM studies, should reconsider the extent to which PEOU affects online shopping at the early adoption stage. Similarly, in the case of Canadian customers, PU is the main factor that directly and indirectly affects intention to shop online. Furthermore, in developing programs to motivate customers to shop online, e-retailers must recognize the importance of trust on PEOU, PU, attitude and intention to shop as trust had the strongest effect on PEOU for the Pakistani sample and on PU for the Canadian sample.

Is More Information Content Always Good? Investigating the Impact of Website Interface Features on E-Retailer’s Sales Performance

The emergence of the World Wide Web initiated a new era of online consumerism. Though the Internet allows customers to order products conveniently and immediately, and to access information to make informed purchase decisions, it can also be an unknown realm for many. As the Internet Retailer (2009) reports in the United States, the 2007 total online retail sales and the total number of transactions for the top 500 websites rose by 21.8% and 8.8% respectively. Therefore, customers have readily adopted the Internet for various purposes, and properly used, it is a powerful tool for selling products and services. The most commonly used methods for conducting commerce on the Internet involves selling goods and services through a company’s website. However, developing a website is not without risk and businesses today face numerous challenges in their efforts to develop a website that is both functional and productive for both consumer and firm. Since customers often view this form of shopping as risky, they often rely on the information available from a firm’s website to determine the quality and performance of the product and thus if they are interested in purchasing from that website. Through such information gathering, firms are able to lower their customer’s perceived risk and simultaneously encourage them to make the purchase.

Differential Effects of Customers’ Regulatory Fit on Trust, Perceived Value, and M-Commerce Use among Developing and Developed Countries

Despite promising growth, mobile commerce (m-commerce) still represents only a small proportion of the worlds total e-commerce market. The research behind this article moves away from the predominantly single-country (typically developed) and utilitarian-focused market scope of past research to examine and provide a more nuanced understanding of customers’ motivations, whether utilitarian or hedonic, for using m-commerce across six countries. The six-country context, with data collected from 1,183 m-commerce users, offers a unique opportunity to advance mobile-retailing literature by comparing customers’ value perceptions, trust, and m-commerce use across disparate national markets. By treating motivations as conditions activated by individuals’ chronic regulatory orientations, our results show that hedonic motivation plays a more significant role in influencing customers’ value perceptions and trust for those who are promotion oriented (Australia and the United States), whereas utilitarian motivation plays a more important role for those who are prevention oriented (Bangladesh and Vietnam). Finally, both hedonic and utilitarian motivations play an important role in influencing customers’ value perceptions and trust for those who are moderately promotion and prevention oriented (India and Pakistan). These results offer insights to mobile retailers operating internationally in their decisions to standardize or adapt the mobile-shopping environment to deliver the most valuable, trustworthy, and engaging solutions to customers.

The Potential Benefits of Offering Suitable Mobile Commerce Experience to Your Customers: An Abstract

Mobile devices have become increasingly popular in recent decades: It is estimated that there are more mobile devices than individuals around the world. Individuals spend considerably more time on their smartphones than on their computers; however, m-commerce (i.e. purchase of goods or services through a mobile device) represents only 11.6% of the total e-commerce market in the USA. To design more effective m-commerce environments, marketers must fully understand which consumer motivations drive value perceptions. This study investigates the role of consumers’ hedonic (e.g. fun and enjoyment) and utilitarian (e.g. instrumental and functional) motivations on perceived trust and value. In line with the regulatory fit theory, promotion-oriented consumers (e.g. eager and aspirational) appear more likely to use m-commerce because of hedonic motivations, whereas prevention-oriented consumers (e.g. vigilant and risk-averse) appear more likely to use m-commerce because of utilitarian motivations. This effect is the result of the fit experience (i.e. enhanced engagement and a ‘feels right’ sentiment) that leads to increased perceptions of trust and value. These results offer invaluable insights to marketers, who, due to mobile devices’ reduced screen sizes, must carefully select which content and design elements to use in their m-commerce environments to deliver valuable, trustworthy and engaging solutions.

The Role of Consumer Innovativeness in Mobile Commerce Usage: A Comparison of Two Emerging Countries: An Abstract

Mobile commerce has not only seen remarkable growth in recent years but also shows promising trends for the future. Research has, however, not paid enough attention to understand the factors that determine the perceived value of m-commerce for consumers. This study advances the literature by providing a framework of the drivers and barriers to m-commerce value, in India and Pakistan, countries with immense m-commerce potential. This context also provides an opportunity to observe how consumers’ m-commerce behavior differs across different countries, as determinants like perceived risk and cost are likely to have a more pronounced effect in these relatively nascent markets. The proposed framework connects m-commerce value, and in turn the actual usage to their key determinants including ubiquity, risk, and cost, while investigating the moderating effects of personal innovativeness. The results reveal that ubiquity has a positive impact on perceived m-commerce value, while risk and cost have a negative influence. We also find a significant moderating effect of innovativeness on all three drivers of value. The results further show that perceived value positively affects m-commerce usage and is strengthened by consumer innovativeness. We discuss theoretical and managerial implications of the results, discussing how retailers can enhance their marketing strategies, particularly in emerging m-commerce markets.

What Does Regulatory Fit Have to do with the Online Customer’s Decision-Making Process? An Abstract

Despite the strong growth of Internet and e-commerce sales, this distribution channel has not been as successful as initially expected. Low shopper retention (i.e., retaining visitors for longer periods of time) and low conversion rates (i.e., the percentage of the visitors who actually make a purchase) are viewed as significant impediments to online sales growth (Campbell et al. 2013). A closer look at the literature offers some insight into what may account for the lack of a theoretical and practical understanding of this issue. First, to date, decision-making research in general (Khan and Dhar 2006, 2007) and e-retailing research in particular have mainly focused on individual consumer choices and decisions (Campbell et al. 2013; Deng and Poole 2010) and have evaluated shopping trips on the merit of goods acquired (Babin et al. 1994; Holbrook 1986). Second, e-retailers have paid little attention to how the specific type of online shopping experience, which precedes the selection of tangible products, affects consumer purchasing decisions. Recent self-regulation and goal congruence research has shown that consumers’ decisions can be affected by their previous experiences, actions, and/or by activating certain goals that guide their subsequent choices (Dewitt et al. 2009; Muraven and Baumeister 2000; Khan and Dhar 2006; Labroo and Lee 2006). Taken together, these findings suggest that consumers’ prior experiences/decisions can influence their subsequent decisions. Hence, relevant questions that arise are: (1) How do online customers evaluate their shopping experiences on hedonic versus utilitarian websites, and how do they subsequently make product decisions in an environment where the experience offered and the product options vary in terms of their mix of hedonic and utilitarian attributes? And (2) would e-retailers benefit more from offering a combined hedonic and utilitarian experience (i.e., high hedonic/high utilitarian experience) or investing more in one of the two options (i.e., high hedonic/low utilitarian experience or low hedonic/high utilitarian experience)?

Adoption of Online Shopping in South Asia: A Technology Acceptance Perspective

The worldwide proliferation of online shopping during the past decade has created a need to better understand the adoption of such activity across the globe. Viewing online shopping as a ‘process’, this study addresses some of the gaps in the online shopping adoption literature (i.e., consumer acceptance of online shopping in the Emerging Asian markets) by focusing on culture specific dimensions of the technology acceptance phenomenon. More specifically, it uses an extended version of TAM combined with literature on information technology and culture to identify the drivers of online shopping adoption in Pakistan. It then makes an attempt to validate the applicability of TAM in a cultural setting other than the developed Western world. An empirical study was conducted to test the proposed extended TAM model using data from university students in Pakistan. Contrary to previous research, results of this study render support for the applicability of TAM in a culture that scores high on uncertainty avoidance, collectivism, power distance, and masculinity.

The Influence of Online Customers’ Regulatory Fit on Their Attitude and Purchase Intention

At the same time that global internet usage has increased significantly in the past few decades, the number of online shoppers has also risen rapidly as internet adoption and penetration level increase. In addition to the slow acceptance of e-commerce around the world, e-retailers also must face the challenges associated with selling in a competitive marketplace: online shoppers can switch from one website to another effortlessly (Deng and Poole 2010) and so increased web traffic does not necessarily and automatically translate into sales (Doherty and Ellis-Chadwick 2009). Hence, it is crucial for e-retailers facing ever increasing global and domestic customer demands and competition to develop a deeper comprehension of the driving forces that not only attract online customers to a website but also motivate them to take a desired action and/or make a purchase.