Examining the impact of organisational and owner's characteristics on the extent of e-commerce adoption in SMEs

As electronic commerce (EC) (e-commerce) booms, research on factors influencing the adoption of e-commerce has caught researchers' attention. The results of this research stream have facilitated our understanding of e-commerce adoption. However, the research results have been mixed. Furthermore, previous studies placed more focus on organisational factors than on owners' demographic factors. This research was initiated to resolve those conflicting findings and focused on the impact of owners' characteristics in ecommerce adoption. Data collected from 600 Small- and Medium-size Enterprises (SMEs) were analysed with one-way ANOVA and hierarchical regression to investigate the impacts of three organisational characteristics and four owner characteristics. The results revealed that those variables explained a small amount of variance in the extent of e-commerce adoption. The main findings include: (1) managerial experience has impact on the extent of ecommerce adoption and (2) the extent of e-commerce adoption varies across business types. This paper discusses these findings in the context of previous research and implications.