EMPIRICAL ADOPTION PATTERNS OF E-COMMERCE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: CASE STUDY IN PALESTINE

More and more people from around the world have become accustomed to buying and selling across the Internet. E-Commerce has become an important interaction channel with customers and partners. Today’s enterprises cannot afford being left behind. This is very true from a competitive perspective. This study investigates e-commerce adoption patterns in Palestine. There are commonalities across countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The similarities span across culture, language, economic situation…etc. Therefore, outcomes of this study may be extrapolated to the MENA region to some extent. The study explores the relevant criteria local enterprises consider when deciding to adopt e-commerce. In particular, we assess the relevancy of (18) different parameters from the perspective of decision makers.The study involved a relatively large sample of (3006) enterprises from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Optimal Data Analysis (ODA) was used for analysis. ODA identifies non-parametric model that maximizes weighted classification accuracy for the tested variables. Bivariate discrimination of enterprises which "do" versus "don't" practice e-commerce was evaluated for each parameter. The results revealed that both technological and organizational attributes are more influential than external or environmental ones. The availability of technology, ICT competencies, enterprise size, and the availability of financial resources are found to have effective impact in pushing towards adopting e-commerce. Environmental attributes like culture, cost, nature of product, etc. have failed to have significant persuading power on adopting e-commerce.