E-commerce Platform Acceptance: Suppliers, Retailers, and Consumers

This book aims to offer a comprehensive overview of the issues facing organizations when deciding whether to accept e-commerce as a platform for business. It provides a detailed evaluation of how the implementation of e-commerce may affect all parties within the supply chain: suppliers, retailers and consumers. It also compares various opportunities and threats of accepting e-commerce in order to conclude whether it might offer access to a new digital era, or whether it is an uncertain option yielding potential pitfalls. This book helps to reveal existing and future consequences of e-commerce acceptance, which are crucial for business decisions and operations in the present and going forward. It therefore provides a unique insight into emerging e-commerce platform acceptance and is one of the first to provide a holistic perspective of how each party in the supply chain is affected by e-commerce acceptance.

E-commerce is bringing into view more flexible, effective and efficient ways of conducting business activities among suppliers, retailers and consumers. It is not limited to time and space and therefore this digital platform has already established for itself a major role in today’s world economy. Despite promised benefits however, threats emerge which need to be faced when turning to the virtual marketplace - all of which have to be acknowledged before businesses will shift and adapt to the e-commerce platform. This book is intended for postgraduate students, executive MBA students and researchers interested in information management, marketing and operations management.

Dr Hing Kai Chan joined the Norwich Business School of the University of East Anglia in September 2007 and is now a Senior Lecture in Operations and Supply Chain Management. Dr Chan is an active researcher and has more than 100 academic publications, including 80 journal papers (over 60 are S/SCI-indexed). His publications appear in Decision Support Systems and various IEEE Transactions and so on. His publications are directly related to theme of this book (e.g. formation of virtual organisations and hence e-commerce platform acceptance). Recently, he and his co-authors published the book titled ’Decision-Making for Supply Chain Integration’ (2012) with Springer.

Dr Nick Yip is a Lecturer in Marketing at the Norwich Business School, UEA. He spent 18 years in industry holding various marketing and management positions within the service industry including Malaysia Airlines, KLIA Express and Unilever. His research interests are in the areas of value co-creation and the pricing of services. He has published in the Service Industries Journal, European Management Journal and the Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management. His UK projects include working with the BAE Systems and with the South Devon National Health Service (NHS). He has served as an academic supervisor on a Knowledge Transfer Programme (KTP) with a defence consulting firm on service transformation. Currently, he sits on the editorial board (academic) for the Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management.

Ms Ewelina Lacka is a postgraduate researcher whose work directly focuses on acceptance of e-commerce. In her MSc thesis she examined the effect of non-native cultural values on e-commerce acceptance and in her current PhD research project she aims to investigate the effect of the acculturation process of consumers in their acceptance of e-commerce platforms with the further aim being to confirm research findings across number of businesses operating in virtual environments. Her research interests therefore range from consumer and business acceptance of technology with the emphasis put on e-commerce platform acceptance to human behaviour in computer mediated environments.