A Model of Internet Commerce Adoption (Mica)

Abstract

The commercialisation of the Internet has led to widespread usage of on-line services and being connected to the Internet has become a high priority for both large and small to medium size enterprises (SMEs) (Wai-Pun, Farhoomard and Tunnainen, 1997). Internet usage around the world is doubling every 10 days, with the number of people on the Internet expected to increase ten-fold from 100 million to 1 billion by 2005 (Network Wizards, 1995). The biggest transformation is in the area of e-commerce, which is expected to boom from (US) $6 billion in 1997 to more than $300 billion in 2002 (NOIE, 1998b). There is no doubt that it will be an imperative for any business to be part of the global Internet commerce community. Doing business online provides new opportunities for business, as well as presenting new business opportunities, facilitating new forms of e-commerce across industries in both the business to consumer and business to business context. It also provides new one-one as well as the more traditional one-many customer relationships and greater opportunities for customer-supplier interaction (Rayport and Savioka, 1995). The result will be more open economies and a levelling of opportunities for all businesses. This will enable small companies to overcome the main advantages (such as economies of scale and greater access to resources) of their larger counterparts. The proliferation of e-commerce and the exponential growth of the Internet as a commercial medium has resulted in the development of a number of frameworks that seek to enable a better understanding of what businesses are doing on the Web.