Resumen de The Enablers and Disablers of E-Commerce: Consumers’ Perspectives

Mohammed A. Alqahtani, Ali Hamad Al-Badi, Pam J. Mayhew

• The availability and continued growth of Internet technologies (IT) have created great opportunities for users all over the globe to benefit from these services and use them in a variety of different ways. The use of IT to conduct business online is known as Electronic Commerce (E-Commerce). While developed countries have harnessed and adopted E-Commerce, developing countries are not yet fully adapted to its adoption. The aim of this study is to investigate the main factors that play a role in the adoption of E-Commerce from a consumer’s perceptive and, hence, develop a framework that conceptualises the influential factors (enablers and disablers) of E-Commerce. A ‘grounded theory’ methodology was used to collect and analyse the data and develop the proposed framework. Thus, semi-structured interviews were conducted with Saudi residents to elicit their opinions about E-Commerce enablers and disablers in Saudi Arabia. The findings of the study suggest that the factors that have the most significant impact on the adoption of E-Commerce in Saudi Arabia are security, fraud and hacking, trust, cyber-law, awareness and perceived usefulness, postal services, government e-readiness, resistance to change, the presence of commercial electronic websites, cost, tangibility, warranty, trial and experience.