Psychological factors affecting the consumer's intention to use e-commerce: a theoretical approach

AuthorMahmoud Al-dalahmeh/Ali Salman Saleh
PositionSchool of Economics, Faculty of Commerce University of Wollongong, Australia/School of Economics, Faculty of Commerce University of Wollongong, Australia
Pages40-60

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1. Introduction

Online transactions have made the world very small. Via internet, individuals can sell their products and promote them without opening shops or employing sales men. This process can be conducted via the assistance of internet marketing i.e. Electronic Commerce.

Using world-wide-web, marketers can display their products, businesses and services to very wide categories of people. The introduction of this new technology provides various means for retailers to enhance and trade their businesses. Internet facilities and other means of communications make e-commerce more accessible for different varieties of people. E-commerce started first in USA as it was used for military purposes and medical exchange experience until it was widely distributed in and the USA, and the purposes of using e-mail and internet widen also.

Online usage has decreased time and distance barriers (Sheth, Eshghi & Krishman, 2001; Chiam, 2006) and therefore it has been used as a distribution channel in e-commerce to the effect that the procedures

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and methods of commerce have been widely changed (Torjak, 2003). E-commerce started in 1990s (Padhyay, 2002) and has, by all means, effected industry all over the world. In spit of the wide distribution of e- commerce activities, the nature, dynamics and the impact of this phenomenon is known. This is a consequence of the paucity of systematic investigation reported in literature concerning this subject (Lee, 2001, p. 3).

It is worth noting here that in the case of Australia, 80% of business leaders admit that electronic commerce will revolutionize the ways of business they will carry out in the coming few years. According to Andersen Consulting Group (1999) Australian organizations are aware of the opportunities that may be associated with introducing the e-commerce, but they are not confident how much it adds value to their businesses.

MacGregor and Vrazalic (2004), have studied the e-commerce usage among Australian SMEs and tried to compare it with other countries. They showed that SMEs in Karlstad (Sweden) had progressed in e-commerce use more than their counterparts in Australia (Wollongong) two years later. E-commerce rate in Karlstad was 52.3% while in Wollongong it was 15.6% (P. 43). This shows that SMEs need to be reeducated about the values of e-commerce. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistic, the proportion of businesses that have been conducted via the internet was only 12% during 2004-2005.

Definitions of E-commerce

E-commerce is the short form of Electronic commerce. It can also be shortened to 'eCommerce'. These two shortening indicate the full electronic commerce words (Forder and Quirk, 2001). Ecommerce was defined differently by different researchers (Khosrowpour, 2005). According to Laudon, 2003, e-commerce is the use of the internet and the web to transact business. More formally, digitally enabled commercial transactions between and among organizations and individuals.

Business to Consumer E-Commerce (B2C)

This paper will concern about B2C e- commerce. For this purpose the model of e- commerce has been defined as: "The sale of goods or services electronically via internet directly to individual customers for their own use, rather than to businesses" (Chan, 2001).

However, even though the e-commerce usage worldwide is dramatically increasing, there are still many psychological factors (such as self-efficacy, trait anxiety, consumer, outcome expectations etc) that encumber the growth of e-commerce (EC) worldwide, especially people's perception towards conducting online transactions. Hence, there are many factors yet to be fully covered in the literature that dealing with these psychological factors that affect the intention to use e-commerce. Hence, one of the purposes of this paper is to review the extensive literature on the effect of self- efficacy on e-commerce. The second aim is to

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develop and identify a theoretical framework to study the impact of cognitive social factors on the adoption and usage of EC. More specially, we are identifying new factors such as e-commerce self-efficacy, trait anxiety, consumer trust, which have not been used yet (in this combined format) in the area of e-commerce self-efficacy. Several new hypotheses will be developed throughout this paper.

This paper is organised as follows; Section II examines the literature in regard to the main factors that affect the intention to use e-commerce (such as general self-efficacy, e- commerce self-efficacy, trait anxiety, consumer trust etc). Section 3 reports the empirical studies in regard to the application of the social cognitive theory in other areas. The framework developed will be reported in section 4 as well as the hypothesis. A summary and future research will be reported in Section 5.

2. Literature Review
2. 1 Trait Anxiety (TA)

Trait Anxiety (TA) is defined by Spielberger et al. (1970) as a common tendency to undergo a state anxiety when contended with troubles or challenges. Tellegen (1985) argues that individuals are more expected to suffer anxiety through time and across situations as TA is comparatively stable. Both anxiety and cognitive efficiency are believed to be strongly associated by researchers for a long time. Yerkes and Dodson (1908) tried to simplify this relationship by suggesting a U-shaped relationship model to represent anxiety and cognitive performance. This model and other related research material suppose that very low anxiety levels increasing to fairly average levels will trigger off more cognitive resources to become more accessible and foster the rate of mental operations (Suri & Monroe, 2001). Anxiety is probably the best domain where the distinctiveness of trait- state is best recognized and empirically differentiated. Trait anxiety is identified as a person's general disposition to be anxious where State anxiety refers to anxious affect of situational frustration (Spielberger, 1966; Usala & Hertzog, 1991).

Trait anxiety is regarded as a major element of personality in most modern personality theories as indicated by Thatcher and Perrewe (2002), (see Digman, 1990, for a review). Spielberger, Gorusch, and Lushene (1970), offered a straightforward definition for trait anxiety describing it as "relatively stable individual differences in anxiety proneness" (p. 3). Wilson et al. (1999) stated that trait anxiety is conceptualized as fixed or stable attribute of personality whereas they demonstrated state anxiety as a momentary manner of anxiety that depends on the situation. In order to discover and forecast the association between a person's respiratory distress and trait anxiety, Wilson et al. built a model that indicated the following results:

Individuals suffering high levels of trait anxiety will be more likely exposed to significant increase in state anxiety compared to those with lower levels of trait anxiety.

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Trait anxiety, according to Murata, et al. (2004) stands for the general propensity to be anxious as a personality characteristic whereas state anxiety is described as the level of anxiety at a particular moment. High trait anxiety causes individuals to organize situations while for individuals who are low in trait anxiety, personal adequacy is evaluated more as threat (Spielberger et al. 1973; 1983).

Suri and Monroe (2001) demonstrated how mental efficiency starts to deteriorate if the arousal intensity surpasses a supposed optimal point on the arousal scale. According to this theory it has been suggested that such analysis can be also valid to anxiety and its impact on both memory and responsiveness (Christianson, 1992; Eysenck, 1982). That is to say, reasonable degrees of anxiety are supposed to assist learning and memory performance; nevertheless, consecutive intensifying in these levels of anxiety beyond the optimal anxiety level will lead to lower degrees of learning and memory operating (Christianson, 1992). Anxiety experienced while using e-commerce systems is perceived as a form of a domain- specific trait anxiety. Thus we hypothesise that:

H1: There is a negative relationship between customer's Trait anxiety and E-Commerce self-efficacy. Customer's Trait anxiety will negatively influence the E-Commerce self- efficacy.

2. 2 E-Commerce system Anxiety

State anxiety demonstrates personal feelings of tension, anxiety, and concern which varies in strength and over time (Spielberger et al. 1973; 1983). The following case described by Tome Keating can provide the reader with a deeper understanding of this concept1:

Automotive of the sales process at our company started two years ago, when we began looking for software that could alleviate many sales problems. At the time, our sales representatives did not have personal computers on their desks- and most did not want them!

Computer anxiety is defined as "the fear of impending interaction with a computer that is disproportionate to the actual threat presented by the computer" (Howard, Murphy, & Thomas, 1986, p. 630). A Similar definition for Computer anxiety is offered by Bozionelos (2001) where he explained that the concept stands for the destructive emotions and cognitions evoked either in real or imaginary dealings with computer- based technology. In a study by Anderson (1995), a positive...

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