E-COMMERCE ADOPTION AND ENTREPRENEURIAL SMEs IN RIVERS STATE

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to increase academic understanding as well as provide managerial implications in relation to identifying and examining the factors that determine E-commerce adoption for marketing purposes by small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) in Rivers State, Nigeria. The methodology is empiricist/positivist and the design is survey. In investigating the relative importance of the factors that determine the different levels of online adoption in the context of a developing country, existing theories and models provided patterns which the study followed. The contributions of this research is a synthesis of Resource-based View of the firm (RBV) with Roger’s innovation adoption model and others  to produce a revised conceptualization for the adoption of innovations which is empirically tested for developing country SMEs like Nigeria. It provides an empirical contribution by studying the SMEs as an example of goods and services marketing. The major findings of this research are that management factors are important for the initial adoption decision by firms whereas marketing capabilities are important for more sophisticated adoption. This suggests that different factors affect the different levels of adoption. The implications for marketing firms are that first;  innovation attributes are not the whole story when studying firms’ adoption of the web, firm resources also affect adoption decision. Secondly, different factors affect different levels of adoption thus when studying innovation adoption by firms, it is important to consider the adoption process as a continuous one that consists of different levels rather than a dichotomous process of adopt (online) versus non-adopt (offline).