Abstract:
Electronic commerce (E-Commerce) usage in Sri Lanka is increasing due to various
developments in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector.
Identifying technology adoption factors in the case of E-Commerce and studying their
effectiveness in adoption, among Sri Lankan private sector executives, were primary
objectives of this research. In order to analyze factors affecting adoption of ECommerce
in Sri Lanka, a self-administrated questionnaire was developed and
surveyed using a sample of 389 private sector executives employed in Information
Technology and Telecommunications, Banking and Finance, and the Manufacturing
sectors.
There have been many empirical studies on adoption and diffusion behavior of a new
technology. Two well known technology adoption models, the Technology
Acceptance Model (TAM) (Davis, 1989) and the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB)
(Ajzen, 1991) were used to identify a suitable research framework. Since trust on
online stores or Perceived Risk on online transactions has widely been discussed in
previous E-Commerce literature, a combined model of the TAM and the TPB with
reference to trust in E-Commerce was used to build the research model and
hypotheses.
The survey results revealed that Perceived Ease of Use and Perceived Usefulness have
a strong positive correlation with E-Commerce adoption while Subjective Norm and
Perceived Behavioral Control have a moderately positive correlation on it. The
analysis of findings further revealed that the trust or Perceived Risk in E-Commerce
has a significant impact on other E-Commerce adoption factors, Perceived Ease of
Use, Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Behavioral Control, except Subjective
Norm. In addition, it was found that hi-technology products and digital items maintain
the highest preference in the web market. It further revealed that, the majority, almost
95%, of total respondents are willing to experiment with or continue E-Commerce in
future. It was recommended that web-stores should take the necessary steps to
increase consumer confidence in the E-market in addition to what they offer
customers to make online transactions easy and useful.
