An Empirical Investigation of Electronic Commerce Technology in Corporate Use

This study investigates the usage of five electronic commerce (EC) technologies, including electronic data exchange (EDI), electronic fund transfer (EFT), Internet, intranet, and extranet in organizations. Moreover, t-tests and ANOVA are used to verify whether the usage of EC technology differs by firm size (measured by the number of employees and annual sales volume) and characteristics of supply chain (supply chain length, supply chain position and type of supply chain channel). The results show that the top three EC technologies used by organizations are Internet, intranet, and EDI. The results also show that there are no significant differences in the usage of five EC technologies in relation to a firm’s position in the supply chain and type of supply chain channel that a firm is in. But some differences do exist in the usage of EC technology by the firm size or the length of the supply chain. The larger the size of a firm, the higher the level of the usage of EDI, EFT, and extranet. Moreover, for small firms, the longer the supply chain that a firm is in, the higher the level of usage of EDI and extranet.