Adoption E-commerce in development country and the moderator effect of digital divide

Abstract

With the creation and worldwide diffusion of the Internet since the end of the last century, social and economic relations have seen a strong tendency to move from analog to digital, generating new ways of performing everyday tasks. In going digital, commerce has found a new channel of communication between client and company.

E-commerce was created with the characteristics of a new technology which has been widely adopted and diffused in nearly all regions, societies and cultures. However, like all innovations within a social system, there have been differences in its adoption that could be linked to inequalities in access and use.

This research focuses on analysing the adoption and diffusion of e-commerce in the developing Latin American country of Colombia. It focuses on Colombia because of the low number of large studies that have been conducted there, despite the great development of the Internet and ICTs in the country.

This study applies in parallel two lines of research - on one hand, it validates the UTAUT2 technological acceptance model for different types of e-commerce; on the other hand, it develops an index that measures the digital divide by country, finally analysing the two results to establish if the level of digital divide is linked to behavior in the adoption of e-commerce.

The work contains four sections that give rise to the chapters of this thesis in order of appearance: introduction, state of the issue, publications that respond to the objectives, and conclusions and future lines of research.

The introductory chapter justifies the relevance of the research in addition to setting the objectives and methodology of the work. The second chapter is the state of the issue, which addresses the main models of e-commerce adoption, as well as the digital divide.

Having defined the models and the methodological criteria, the third chapter includes the publications that respond to the objectives, within them the whole empirical process of the research is collected as well as the main results which have gone through the rigorous process of scientific publication in magazines indexed in the Scopus, in their majority.

Finally, chapter four contains the main conclusions of the work, as well as possible future lines of research. The results of this doctoral thesis have been valuable, since there were clear indications of the moderating effect of the digital divide on the adoption of e-commerce, which will help those at a business and governmental level to further understand, improve and develop e -commerce in this type of country.