An Empirical Investigation of an e-commerce Adoption-Capability Model in Small Businesses in New Zealand

The current research attempted to investigate the significance of an adoption-capability model of e-commerce technologies (EC) in Small to Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in New Zealand (NZ). The research model hypothesised ten factors as significantly influencing EC adoption in SMEs: relative advantage, cost, compatibility, size, information intensity of products, support from technology vendors, pressure from suppliers/buyers, competition, CEO’s innovativeness, and CEO’s involvement. Further, the model attempted to differentiate between adopters and non-adopters in terms of the adopted EC and hence, categorized them into three clusters of adoption: starters, adopters and extended adopters. It was believed that such classifications could assist this research in identifying innovative and EC capabilities among the SMEs in NZ. The research findings indicated that: (1) starters: the adoption of the Internet and external email was dependent on the innovativeness of the CEO; (2) innovators: the adoption of any of the EC Infrastructure technologies (ECIT): Intranet, Extranet, Internet-EDI and websites was dependent on CEO’s innovativeness, organization size, and compatibility; and (3) extended innovators: the adoption of more than one ECIT was dependent on organization size, compatibility, CEO’s innovativeness, support from technology vendors, and competition. It was observed that adopters and extended adopters started to witness the significant effect of different factors on their adoption decision of different EC technologies. The research pointed to other significant influences and anomalies in the research model and addressed implications pertaining to theory and to practice in SMEs in NZ.