A Study of Factors Influencing Consumer Adoption of Group-Buying Sites in Malaysia

Group-buying sites have been the biggest internet phenomena in the recent B2C ecommerce industry. This new development has led to this research’s main objective of identifying factors that influence consumers’ intention to purchase from groupbuying sites, particularly in Malaysia. Using the extended Technology Acceptance Model, the five factors measured against consumers’ behavioral intent to transact are perceived knowledge, perceived benefits of price promotion, personal innovativeness, social influence, and perceived risks. Primary data for the purpose of this study was gathered through a combination of telephone interview with Groupon Malaysia and online questionnaire surveys.Multiple linear regression analysis suggests that the proposed model explains 48.4% of the variance in consumers’ intention to adopt. This means that the model serves as a good predictor and shows a reasonable amount of variance explained for behavioral intention to transact. Findings of the study indicate that perceived knowledge and perceived benefits of price promotions have a significant positive relationship towards consumer adoption of group-buying sites. Perceived risk, on the other hand, has a significant negative relationship towards consumers’ adoption of group – buying sites. Interestingly, both personal innovativeness and social influence do not have a significant relationship towards consumer adoption of group-buying sites. The factor that contributes most towards behavioral intent to transact is perceived risk, thus explaining the slow adoption rate of group-buying sites in Malaysia. Several recommendations are put forward to assist group-buying sites in Malaysia understand consumer behaviour to speed up the adoption rate and ensure success of this new online business model. A major limitation to this research has been the lack of academic articles available on group-buying sites. Consequently, ideas for further research recommendations are also presented