Migrating to internet-based e-commerce: Factors affecting e-commerce adoption and migration at the firm level

Web technology has enabled e-commerce. However, in our review of the literature, we found little research on how firms can better position themselves when adopting e-commerce for revenue generation. Drawing upon technology diffusion theory, we developed a conceptual model for assessing e-commerce adoption and migration, incorporating six factors unique to e-commerce. A series of propositions were then developed. Survey data of 1036 firms in a broad range of industries were collected and used to test our model. Our analysis based on multi-nominal logistic regression demonstrated that technology integration, web functionalities, web spending, and partner usage were significant adoption predictors. The model showed that these variables could successfully differentiate non-adopters from adopters. Further, the migration model demonstrated that web functionalities, web spending, and integration of externally oriented inter-organizational systems tend to be the most influential drivers in firms’ migration toward e-commerce, while firm size, partner usage, electronic data interchange (EDI) usage, and perceived obstacles were found to negatively affect e-commerce migration. This suggests that large firms, as well as those that have been relying on outsourcing or EDI, tended to be slow to migrate to the internet platform.