Measuring e-Commerce Technology Enabled Business Value: An Exploratory Research

While a plethora of anecdotal evidence exists, there is little empirical evidence on the value-creating potential of e-commerce technologies. The present research investigates whether firms using e-commerce technologies are successful in generating business value and, if so, what e-commerce drivers determine success and how to best use these drivers. This work shows how diffusion theory can be used to analyze the wide-spread utilization of e-commerce technologies and how they create business value. It presents an exploratory model of e-commerce business value grounded in information technology (IT) business value and productivity literature. We use a sample from more than 550 company executives, identified as innovative and successful users of IT.