Migrating to internet-based e-commerce: Factors affecting e-commerce adoption and migration at the firm level

Web technology has enabled e-commerce. However, in our review of the literature, we found little research on how firms can better position themselves when adopting e-commerce for revenue generation. Drawing upon technology diffusion theory, we developed a conceptual model for assessing e-commerce adoption and migration, incorporating six factors unique to e-commerce. A series of propositions were then developed. Survey data of 1036 firms in a broad range of industries were collected and used to test our model. Our analysis based on multi-nominal logistic regression demonstrated that technology integration, web functionalities, web spending, and partner usage were significant adoption predictors. The model showed that these variables could successfully differentiate non-adopters from adopters. Further, the migration model demonstrated that web functionalities, web spending, and integration of externally oriented inter-organizational systems tend to be the most influential drivers in firms' migration toward e-commerce, while firm size, partner usage, electronic data interchange (EDI) usage, and perceived obstacles were found to negatively affect e-commerce migration. This suggests that large firms, as well as those that have been relying on outsourcing or EDI, tended to be slow to migrate to the internet platform. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.