How do portuguese college students perceive e-commerce?

• Autor(a) principal: Oliveira, Sérgio Vasconcelos de
• Data de Publicação: 2006
• Outros Autores: Reis, António Palma dos
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/1207
• topic: E-Commerce; E-Business; User Acceptance; PCI - Perceived Characteristics of Innovation; TAM - Technology Acceptance Model; Internet Usage; Diffusion; Cognitive Decision Models; Social Cognitive Model; Self-Efficacy; Consumer Behaviour

This paper identifies that e-commerce adopters and non-adopters rate differently each of the supposed e-commerce qualities. While adopters consider that the most important qualities of e-commerce are best values on e-commerce, detailed information on e-commerce, timeliness, easiness of comparing and comfort, non-adopters rate personalization and availability higher than adopters do. The various patterns of attitude regarding e-commerce qualities were identified through a principal component factor analysis that proposed four factors: detail towards the optimal choice; practical; best values; and flexibility. The structural equation model explained e-commerce adoption based on the factors above and identified that while high ratings of detail towards optimal choice, practical and best values have a positive impact on e-commerce adoption, high ratings of flexibility is negatively associated with it. The negative association between the valuation of flexibility as an e-commerce quality and e-commerce adoption suggests that e-commerce is not providing enough flexibility, which is composed by personalization and availability, since the adopters rate it lower than the non-adopters do, what leads us to recommend improvements on these features towards the encouragement of the Internet users that are not yet e-commerce adopters.