An Empirical Study of Factors that Influence the Extent of Deployment of Electronic Commerce for Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises in Australia

This study surveys the perceptions and experiences of Australian small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the adoption and implementation of Internet-based Electronic Commerce (EC) as seen from the perspective of the extent of deployment. The extent of deployment is one of the major component of implementation success and one of the most important dimensions. With a sample of 115 small businesses in Australia, this paper uses regression modelling to explore and establish the factors that are related to the extent of deployment. The analysis was carried out on the 19 influencing factors of EC and 7 factors – perceived relative advantage, trialability, observability, variety of information sources, communication amount, competitive pressure, and non-trading institutional influences, were found to make a significant contribution to the extent of deployment of Internet-based EC