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Mobile commerce (m-commerce) is about buying and selling of goods and services through wireless handheld devices such as cellular phones and personal digital assistants (Njenga, Litondo & Omwansa, 2016; Chau & Deng, 2018a). It provides businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with cost-effective ways to promote their products and services online (Hong, 2019). This has numerous benefits including improving productivity, increasing customer satisfaction, and lowering operational costs (Varshney, Malloy, Ahluwalia & Jain, 2004; Chau & Deng, 2018b; Duan, Deng & Luo, 2019). As a result, m-commerce is becoming increasingly popular across the world.
Despite the benefits, the adoption of m-commerce in SMEs in developing countries remains limited (Nafea & Younas, 2014). In Vietnam, for example, only 20% of SMEs have built websites for promoting their business. About 70% of these websites are difficult to access by mobile devices (VECITA, 2017). Such poor adoption in SMEs is due to the complex adoption process (Stoica, Miller & Stotlar, 2005) in which many factors such as individual attributes (Njenga et al., 2016), technological, organizational, and environmental aspects (Jain, Le, Lin & Cheng, 2011; Njenga et al., 2016), managerial issues (Alfahl, Houghton & Sanzogni, 2017), and trust (Rahman, 2013) affect the adoption of m-commerce. To improve the adoption in SMEs, better understanding the critical determinants for m-commerce adoption is significant.
Numerous studies have been conducted for investigating the adoption of m-commerce under various circumstances (Jain et al., 2011; Lu, Hu, Huang & Tzeng, 2015; Martin & Jimenez, 2015; Alfahl et al., 2017). A comprehensive investigation of such studies reveals that most studies on organizational m-commerce adoption focus on large enterprises, with limited research on SMEs (Chau & Deng, 2018a, 2018b). Since SMEs possess unique characteristics (Duan et al., 2019), the research findings from these studies may not be applicable to SMEs. As a result, more research on SMEs is needed to bridge this gap in the literature.
Understanding the critical determinants of m-commerce adoption requires a comprehensive investigation of the characteristics of m-commerce from the perspective of organizations. Such characteristics can be either primary or secondary (Downs & Mohr, 1976). The primary characteristics are related to m-commerce itself. These characteristics are independent of the perception of the organization. The secondary characteristics are related to the perception of the organization (Downs & Mohr, 1976). Decision-makers usually evaluate the characteristics of specific innovations for adoption (Sutanonpaiboon & Pearson, 2006). Their perception of these characteristics leads to the adoption. Because different organizations perceive the primary characteristics in different ways, their decisions on innovation adoption might differ. This indicates the limitation of primary characteristics in innovations adoption studies. It proves the importance of the perception of organizations in exploring the critical determinants of m-commerce adoption.
This study investigates how the perception of SMEs on m-commerce influences its adoption. It aims to (a) identify a comprehensive set of the perceived characteristics of m-commerce adoption and (b) examine the influence of such characteristics on the adoption of m-commerce in Vietnamese SMEs. To achieve these aims, a perception-based conceptual model for m-commerce adoption in Vietnamese SMEs is developed with respect to the technology-organization-environment framework. The conceptual model is then tested and validated using structural equation modelling (SEM) on the data collected from 513 SMEs in Vietnam.
This study has important implications for both theory and practice. Theoretically, the study contributes to organizational m-commerce adoption literature by developing a perception-based model for identifying the critical determinants in SMEs. Practically, the study identifies the critical determinants for m-commerce adoption, leading to the formulation of specific strategies and policies to facilitate the development of m-commerce in SMEs under various circumstances.