The Cross Border E-commerce Adoption Intensity Of Enterprises In China

Against the background of depressing foreign trade in China, cross border e-commerce does become the new stimulation for the growth of foreign trade. By adopting cross border e-commerce, enterprises could break through the constraints of geographic limit to get higher profit and greater development space from the global market. Even the government is vigorously promoting the cross border e-commerce to become a new growth point for foreign trade. But restricted by technical and policy-related factors, such as difficulties in foreign exchange settlement causing higher cost, platform marketing that can’t satisfy the needs of development, lack of brand building for those cross border e-commerce enterprises, great risk in cross border payments, cumbersome customs procedures, and high cross border logistic cost, traditional enterprise transition to cross border e-commerce has not reached the expectation. The cross border e-commerce adoption intensity and application effects vary from company to company. Overall, it leads to weaker competitiveness for enterprises. As a result, practically and theoretically, it is meaningful to identify the stage of the cross border e-commerce for an enterprise and study factors influencing different adoption intensity.Firstlywe define “cross border e-commerce adoption” and “cross border e-commerce adoption intensity”. The adoption of cross border e-commerce is based on the recognition and evaluation of cross border e-commerce processes, from where the enterprise is intended to adopt and apply new technology so that it can integrate the process of the core business processes within organizations. For those organizations that have adopted the cross border e-commerce, the adoption intensity is the extent or the stage the organization is on. Then we take the intra-organizational factors into consideration to modify the original TOE framework, and construct the conceptual model for factors influencing crossborder e-commerce adoption intensity. We also put forward hypotheses and design a questionnaire regarding the development of cross border e-commerce for enterprises. Data is collected by questionnaires. The empirical study is developed by two steps: firstly, based on the adoption intensity, we divide the sample into two groups by the cluster analysis, namely the primary stage and the advanced stage. Secondly, we discuss those factors that significantly affected the cross border e-commerce adoption intensity. By comparing the Standardized coefficients, P-value of the Wald chi-square test and Logistic pseudo partial correlation,we rank the predictor variables in logistic regression and analyze the factors that influence the adoption intensity the most. At last, we provide some policy suggestions.We find that:(1) We can divide the cross border e-commerce adoption intensity into two groups, one is the primary stage where enterprises display products and services information on websites without any online transactions, and the other is the advanced stage where the websites can provide online payment and online order fulfillment,business processes offline can be integrated into the online transactions.(2)By controlling some variables such as the industry, the ownership and size of enterprises, we analyze the factors influencing cross border e-commerce adoption intensity. In terms of technological factors, technology readiness, perceived ease-of-use and perceived usefulness are factors affecting the adoption intensity positively. In terms of intra-organizational factors, the market share of enterprises and the competitive pressure from its industry are affecting the adoption intensity positively. In terms of inter-organizational factors, top management support affects the adoption intensity positively. In terms of environmental factors, policy affects the adoption intensity positively.(3)We compare the importance of those influencing factors. We find those factors such as perceived usefulness, technology readiness,competitive pressure and perceived ease-of-use impact the adoption intensity the most. Among those factors, technology readiness, which guarantees the adoption of cross border e-commerce, affects the adoption intensity mostly; the competitive pressure affects the adoption intensity greatly because the relation among enterprises poses a great pressure on the adoption of new technology in the opening internet environment.And the top management support and regulatory support pose impact on the adoption intensityto some extent.The innovation of our research is that we extend the current TOE framework by taking into account of intra-organizational factors, combining it with the adoption intensity in both theory and the empirical study to identify the adoption intensity for cross border e-commerce and find the influencing factors for different adoption intensity. Moreover, we compare the importance of those influencing factors.