Abstract
The application of e-commerce platforms for retailing agricultural products has been increasingly adopted for several benefits namely market expansion and connection, brand establishment, price improvement as well as the motivation for farmers to actively ameliorate their farming practices, product quality and package. However, this retail method is still lagging far behind in Vietnam - despite the need for digitalization to solve persistent problems, namely the imbalanced supply, demand and accompanied price loss in the traditional distribution channel. Thus, this research aims to investigate the factors that impact the Vietnamese farmers’ intention to adopt e-commerce platforms for fresh produce retail. The paper applies the integrated Technology Acceptance Model and Technology-Organization-Environment framework. Through an online survey, a sample of 344 farmers who produced fruits and vegetables across Vietnam was drawn to confirm the hypotheses of this study. The results showed that there are positive relationships between three factors “Perceived usefulness” (PU), “Perceived Ease of use” (PEOU) and “Intention to Adopt” (INT). Among the variables, technological context (TC) is positively associated with both PU and PEOU, and organizational context (OC) impacts PU positively. Moreover, the environmental context (EC) is shown to positively influence the intention to adopt e-commerce platforms for fresh produce retail. Findings are valuable to the development of e-commerce platforms and policies to promote Vietnamese farmers’ intention of using e-commerce platforms to retail agricultural products.
Highlights
Agriculture is considered as the backbone of the rural economy and plays a pivotal role in sustainable development (World Bank, 2008)
Most of the respondents claimed that they intended to adopt E-commerce platforms for agricultural product retail (79.8%)
All three determinants of intention to adopt e-commerce platforms for produce retail are significant with distinct beta coefficients, contributing various weights to the variance of intention to apply e-commerce platforms into fresh produce retail activities
Summary
Agriculture is considered as the backbone of the rural economy and plays a pivotal role in sustainable development (World Bank, 2008). The excessive supply of seasonal fruits and vegetables, and the serious loss in produce prices has been a persistent problem throughout the years. Accompanied with this spontaneous mass production, the characteristics of small-scale and scattering lead to the great variation in product quality while making economies of scale unattainable. This marks down the prices for agricultural products and puts more onerous pressure on governmental officials, local cooperatives, and relevant factors to deal with the surplus, not to mention the opportunity for export. Ensuring a comprehensive transformation of the agricultural systems into sustainable, productive, and inclusive food systems would be of great necessity (Le Minh Hoan, 2021)
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