Factors affecting online printing adoption by the Sri Lankan printing industry

Abstract

The printing technologies revolutionized over the time to bring much quality and durable output to its customers. It started with offset and screen-printing and then the technology moved into digital form creating the digitally created print outputs. With the advent of Internet, most print shop owners tend to go online and make their sales in the digital space. They identified that moving into the online market will reduce most of the crowded hazels in their physical store, as well as they can reached to new customers without any boundaries or landmarks. In this study, we tried to identify what are the drivers that contributes to the, consumers’ adoption of online version of the physical print industry. In addition, the drawbacks and barriers that need to be address and overcome to successfully move a print business to the digital space are also analyzed. We used the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to identify the consumers’ attitudes towards online printing services and behavioural intension to use the online printing services. Through the study, we found that consumer characteristics, print product characteristics, website characteristics, and environmental characteristics have a significant impact in the customer decision to select online printing services compared to in-store printing services. Among consumer characteristics, gender, age, and monthly income level perform a major role in moving towards the online printing. Product characteristics such as product type and product price and channel characteristics such as user-friendly website designs and its customer service features get more attention from its potential users. We believe print vendors who are planning to move into the online printing can use these findings as guidelines to decide how to use, when to use, and what ways to use these new technologies with their traditional work process.