Moderating Effect of Gender on E-commerce Adoption

Understanding e-commerce system adoption is an important topic for e-commerce designers and electronic customer relationship managers. Even though there are a lot of research endeavors to explain e-commerce adoption, one of the main questions to be answered is regarding the normative and affective factors based on the theory of reasoned action and the selfdetermination theory. In this paper, the relationships among the social norms, perceived enjoyment, and their relationships to intention to adopt e-commerce system are tested (n = 322). Furthermore, the moderating effects of gender are tested based on the socio-linguistic literature. As expected, the influence of social norms is stronger in the female group while the influence of enjoyment is stronger in the male group. Interestingly, a female is more influenced by her friends while a male is more influenced by his family and media. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed in the paper.