The Proliferation Of E-commerce Technology Empirical Study

Rapid advances in information technologies have brought new opportunity to the economic increase. Internet and electronic-commerce technology have been becoming the new technologies applied by firms to reduce the consumption of resources and enhance the efficiency of business operations, they are greatly affecting and changing the economic and social life of human beings. The government of our country pays much attention on the development of information technologies and the Internet economy, and established the informationization strategy covering all domains of the modernization. Electronic-commerce has become the important guidance of industrial development in our country.Although the Internet-based electronic-commerce technology has many potential advantages and has begun to be applied by our firms, in the whole, the level or degree of its applications in our traditional manufacturing firms is still limited. There have been a lot of researches on the factors affecting the development and applications of electronic-commerce technology in the world, but few researches have conducted from the explanatory view tested empirically in the context of our firms. Supported by several research projects in electronic-commerce, this dissertation conducted an empirical study on the factors affecting the diffusion of electronic-commerce technology, according to the several theories of innovation diffusion and the data collected from the traditional manufacturing firm in Jiaxing district.The study on innovation diffusion has experienced a long time, economics, sociology, and some other theories, such as organizational learning and bandwagon, have their respective explanations to the factors affecting innovation diffusion. Based on these theories and literatures related to innovation diffusion as well as electronic-commerce technology, this paper establishes a theoretical model concerning the influential factors, emphasizing on the four categories of the factors and their interactions, namely, the characteristics of new technology, organizational factors, environmental factors and bandwagon pressure.Through the empirical test of the theoretical model, this research has got some findings. In all the factors which affect the diffusion of electronic-commerce technology, the strongest is the competitive bandwagon pressure; the direct influence of the institutional bandwagon pressure is very weak in some extent, but it is significant, furthermore, moderated by the visibility characteristics of electronic-commerce technology, this influence will be getting stronger; the firm's investment for the sake of accepting electronic-commerce technology has airreplaceable function; among the characteristics of new technology, only the characteristics of ease-of-use and visibility have the significant direct influence, the characteristics of relative advantage has its influence on the diffusion in form of the interaction with the competitive bandwagon pressure.There are some other findings getting from the correlation analysis in the research. During specific period and considering specific samples, the correlation of the environmental factors (including "physical" and "soft" environment) with the degree in which the firms accept electronic-commerce technology is not statistically significant. By the analysis of the realistic condition and relevant literatures, It is explained that the technology or hard environment has been improved greatly and may not restrict the acceptance of electronic-commerce technology at present; on the other hand, the influence of soft environment made up of some factors such as laws, trust and security, is considerably complicated, it may be indirect and only affect the pattern of electronic-commerce or the structure of electronic market.The result of this research suggests that the application of electronic-commerce technology in our firms, on the whole, is still at the initial stage. In addition to the factors emphasized by the previous researches, such as the condition of resource reflected by investment and...