E-commerce in agri-food sector: a systematic literature review

Abstract

This paper aims to synthesize findings in the Agri-food E-commerce (AE) field through a systematic literature review and propose a number of future research directions based on the gaps identified from the review. There has been a general increase in the number of publications, indicating that AE research has elicited more and more interest from scholars in different countries and across multiple disciplines. We have identified a number of themes and made sense of them by developing an integrated conceptual model, which consists of two parts: one for AE adoption at a firm level and one for AE development at a regional level. Furthermore, we recommend that more emphasis should be put on the regional development modes of AE and their impact in the developing world, as the practice is evolving rapidly in some developing countries such as China.