Maturity adoption levels of e-commerce among retailers in developed countries: towards a stagnation model

With the growth of the Internet, firms have realised the potential of this medium as a tool to expand their businesses and offer enormous benefits to their customers. E-commerce is a way to conduct business transactions online. It provides convenience for people to purchase goods and services at lower costs and without the need of having to speak to someone directly or going into a store. E-commerce assists businesses to develop new markets, increase productivity through cost reductions and establish electronic links between businesses which makes it an integral part of the local and global market. Despite e-commerce having been around since the mid-1990s and attracting more and more attention from businesses and consumers, the adoption of e-commerce is still relatively slow among retailers compared to other ways of doing business. This is due to the lack of understanding of the e-commerce phenomenon and the context that is affecting its adoption. This research aims to provide better understanding of e-commerce adoption among Australian retailers. For this purpose the study interviewed firms from different retail categories and used a combination of Daniel et al.’s (2002) stages of growth (SOG) model and Tornatzky and Fleischer’s (1991) technology-organisation- environment (TOE) framework as the basis to develop an integrated e-commerce model that outlines the evolution of e-commerce from B2C (business to consumer) and B2B (business to business) perspectives. The model will be a useful tool for retailers to have a better understanding of their current state of B2C and B2B initiatives as well as helping them to develop suitable strategies to implement online trade and to sell products and services over the Internet.The data analysis has identified five B2C e-commerce maturity levels: web presence, e-commerce portal, e-commerce implementation, e-commerce integration and enterprise integration. The B2B e-commerce levels describe the involvement of the firm in B2B from simple format interaction through emails and other communication tools over the internet to more sophisticated levels until the final level which represents full integration of online and in-store operations.In addition, the study findings suggest that the defined e-commerce levels are influenced by internal and external factors. However, these factors were found to have a different effect on each level of adoption. In addition, the research findings suggest that organisations can reach a stagnation point from which they have no motivation to move further up to the following e-commerce maturity level either now or in the foreseeable future. Moreover, the study identified anxiety points among e-commerce maturity levels where the retailers were found to be interested in advancing further in their e-commerce implementation to integrate e-commerce with their in-store POS (point-of-sale); however, they were uncertain about proceeding as this move is associated with high human and financial investment. Finally, the study found that according to the case organisations, it is unlikely that the online trade will replace the traditional form of trade conducted through the physical location. However, among the case organisations who were involved in e-commerce, the study found that e-commerce represents an important business model for them, despite the low revenue percentage generated through this emerging and developing application of various information and communications technologies (ICTs). The proposed model is expected to be used as a roadmap for organisations considering online trade with customers and business partners