اتخاذ تجارت الکترونیک B2C: بررسی تجربی عوامل تجاری Business-to-business e-commerce adoption: An empirical investigation of business factors

1 Introduction Over the last few years, very few developments in the field of Information Systems (IS) have been as significant as electronic commerce (e-commerce) (Teo and Ranganathan 2004). The phenomenal adoption and growth rates of e-commerce (EC), commonly classified into two types: business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B), attest to its significance as well. While firms are sellers and individuals are buyers in a B2C EC, both sellers and buyers are supply chain partner organizations in a B2B EC model. B2C EC involves millions of diverse transactions per day with a large number of buyers. Though each customer purchase is small in value, the orders must be processed quickly and products delivered to customers on time. B2B EC is defined as Btransactions conducted electronically between organizations that involve the electronic transmission of data and the execution of transactions between business entities, or parts of business entities, using the Internet or privately owned computer networks^ (Ghobakhloo et al. 2014). Employment of B2B EC by firms results in increased operational efficiency, reduced inventories, increased sales and improved financial returns (Lin, Huang and Burn 2007). B2B EC enables firms to perform electronic transactions along the value chain activities (Oliveria and Dhillon 2015). Furthermore, the drivers of adoption for B2B EC are different from those of B2C EC. Compared to B2C EC context, the buyers and sellers in B2B EC context are sophisticated business partners with specific demands; thus the decision to continue with B2B EC does not depend on individual perceptions as in B2C EC (Ghobakhloo et al. 2014). Studies suggest that revenues for all types of B2C ecommerce reached 310 billion USD in 2011, and that the revenues for all types of B2B e-commerce for 2012 exceeded 12.4 trillion USD (Sila 2013; Laudon and Traver 2012). Although such estimates would seem to suggest an increased understanding of B2B e-commerce as a phenomenon, much of the research in the IS discipline has focused on the B2C aspect. Clearly, the vast potential of B2B e-commerce dictates a need for more studies to investigate different facets related to B2B e-commerce and supplement the findings of existent studies. In general, studies have examined issues relating to adoption of e-commerce in B2C e-commerce (for example, Liao et al. 2006; Richards and Shen 2006) and in B2B ecommerce (for example, Alam et al. 2007; Awad and Ragowsky 2008). However, as indicated earlier, most of them have focused more on the consumer aspects rather than on the business aspects. Very few studies have examined the issues relating to the adoption of B2B e-commerce (for example, Son and Benbasat 2007) and specifically, the role of business factors affecting B2B e-commerce. We define Bbusiness factors^ to be a comprehensive set of factors related to industry, organization, and decision maker, which include items, such as, business environment, organizational characteristics, technological context and decision maker’s characteristics. The few studies that examined the adoption focused on business issues relating to adoption of e-marketplaces (Loukis et al. 2011; White et al. 2007).