Estimating the Moderating Effect of Demographic Variables in B2B Ecommerce Adoption in Ghana

Abstract

Different extraneous factors can intervene in the eventual acceptance and use of E-commerce platforms. Thus, an organisation may have a favourable technological space or environment which consists of compatible, complex and low cost software yet it may struggle to adopt technology due to other considerations. In the same way the organizational factors that includes top management support, HR IT competence and financial resources may be available yet it a firm may not simple adopt technology. The same can be said of having a favourable external environment which may consist of favourable competition, good trading partner pressure or favourable regulatory regime to adopt E-commerce. The reason is that each of these attributes may be enough to stimulate positive evaluation of E-commerce or online business value but the real adoption requires more than the factors in this case. Thus, certain stimulants have been discovered as playing intervening role between the desire or intention to adopt and the actual intention in both personal and corporate adoption of technology. In this paper, three extraneous stimulants or intervening mechanisms of B2B ecommerce adoption are analysed through structural equation analysis to examine their moderating effect. The results proves that size, facilitating conditions and the type of industry of a B2B ecommerce organisation can significantly influences its ecommerce adoption. Policy recommendations have been proposed in the subsequent sections of the analysis.