Business Sustainability Through Technology Adoption: Readiness and Acceptance of E-commerce Technology in MSMEs

Abstract

The digital economy requires all countries to participate in preparing for digital transformation. As a country in Southeast Asia, Indonesia must prepare for the era of global competition. In 2020, the Indonesian government launched a digital transformation program with the vision of the ”Largest Digital Economy.” The digitalization of micro and small businesses in Indonesia is experiencing a slowdown due to the difficulty in adopting technology by MSME actors, and partly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus of this research emphasizes the impact of the readiness of micro, small, and medium enterprises as individual decision-makers on the adoption of marketing technology. The Readiness Acceptance Model (TRAM) technology developed by Lin et al. (2007) utilized in this study explains that the impact of individual characteristics and experiences on their use and usefulness dominates the marketing technology decision-making process. The population of this study includes the micro, small, and medium enterprises in the Sukabumi area with 220 respondents as business actors. The method used is path analysis. The results show that the effect of technological readiness of MSME actors in Sukabumi on the acceptance of e-commerce carriers and technological know-how are influenced by the mindset of optimism, innovation, and discomfort, which have a big impact on the perception of ease of use (PEU) and the perception of usefulness (PU). The PEU has a massive impact on perceived advantages (PU) and the PU and PEU both have a significant positive impact on the intention to use.
 Keywords: technology readiness, technology acceptance model, e-commerce, UMKM