Antecedent factors that influence e-business adoption by SMES in Changloon

This thesis studies the adoption of e-business initiatives among SMEs in the town of Changloon, in Northern part of Peninsular Malaysia. The findings of the study confirmed the antecedents of the e-business adoption to include factors such as customer orientation, normative pressures, and competitor orientation. Among the three factors analyzed, only two of these were found to be highly significant. Normative pressure is highly significantly related to e-business adoption. Similarly, customer orientation is also highly significantly related to e-business adoption. However, customer power is not significantly related to e-business adoption. The major implications of this study include (i) trust still poses a major problem associated with e-business adoption among small firms in the remote locality like the town of Changloon; and (ii) customer focus or oriented firms appear to be more willing to adopt e-business. Due to time limitation, the focus of this study is only done in a smaller scope i.e. confine to SMEs in Changloon. Perhaps, it is interesting to conduct similar study at a bigger scale to involve SMEs in Malaysia given a time and budget opportunities and availability.