Title: Preliminary insight into electronic commerce adoption in a developing country: evidence from Ghana

Authors: Frederick Pobee

Addresses: Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Pécs, Hungary

Abstract: Despite the barriers that have slowed electronic commerce adoption in developing countries, evidence suggests a recent surge in its adoption. This research explores the factors that influence the adoption of electronic commerce among Ghanaians. This research integrates the protection motivation theory (PMT) and the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) to propose a conceptual model. Data was collected from 920 Ghanaian university students to validate the conceptual model. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was employed to evaluate the suggested hypotheses. The findings indicate that self-efficacy, response-efficacy, attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control significantly affect the behavioural intention to adopt e-commerce. Whereas perceived vulnerability, perceived severity, and response costs have insignificant effect on the behavioural intention. As a practical implication, e-vendors and website business designers should build online shopping websites that are easy to navigate, requiring less mental and physical stress from consumers.

Keywords: e-commerce; self-efficacy; subjective norm; adoption; behavioural intention; perceived vulnerability; response cost.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEB.2021.118497

International Journal of Electronic Business, 2021 Vol.16 No.4, pp.377 - 390

Received: 25 Aug 2020
Accepted: 03 Apr 2021
Published online: 27 Oct 2021 *

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