An Exploratory Study of Electronic Marketplace Adoption: A Multiple Perspective View

Many researchers have studied the adoption of business-to-business Electronic Marketplaces (EMs), but agreement on which factors are more important driving forces of EM adoption has not been achieved. This may be because researchers have not adopted multiple perspectives, since the importance of EM driving factors may vary when analytical perspectives change. The objective of this paper is to determine if evidence exists that this might indeed be the case. This paper explores the adoption of EMs from multiple perspectives, using case studies. Due to its parsimony, the UTAUT framework suggested by Venkatesh et al. (2003) is adopted to guide the case analysis. EM adoption factors fall into four UTAUT super-categories: performance expectancy; effort expectancy; institutional influence; and facilitating conditions. Results from the case studies indicate that performance expectancy is the most important and ease of use is the least important consideration for participating users. The importance of these factors is examined from both seller/ buyer and market structure perspectives. Preliminary evidence from the case studies indicates that the importance of adoption factors does vary with different perspectives. For example, for buyers, performance expectancy appears to be the most important while, for suppliers, all factors except ease of use appear to be equally important. This implies that suppliers tend to be more passive than buyers in EM adoption.