Critical determinants for mobile commerce adoption in Vietnamese small and medium-sized enterprises

Mobile commerce (m-commerce) is about buying and selling goods and services through wireless handheld devices. It is increasingly becoming popular across the world due to the benefits it provides businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) including improving productivity, increasing customer satisfaction, and lowering operational costs. The tremendous benefits of m-commerce, however, have not been fully utilized in many developing countries. This is because the adoption of m-commerce is a complex process with the involvement of various factors. There is limited research for understanding such adoption in SMEs. Existing research suffers from various shortcomings including (a) the lack of understanding of the emerging pattern of m-commerce adoption in SMEs and (b) the need for better understanding the critical determinants for the adoption of m-commerce in SMEs, especially SMEs in developing countries.

This study investigates the critical determinants for m-commerce adoption in Vietnamese SMEs. It aims to (a) identify the current pattern of the adoption of m-commerce and (b) explore the critical determinants for m-commerce adoption in Vietnamese SMEs. To achieve these aims, a comprehensive review of the related literature has been conducted, leading to the development of a conceptual framework for better understanding m-commerce adoption in SMEs. This framework is then tested and validated using a multi-analytical approach by combining structural equation modelling (SEM) and artificial neural networks on the data collected in Vietnam in two stages.

In the first stage, descriptive statistics and variance analysis are used for investigating the emerging pattern of m-commerce adoption in Vietnamese SMEs with respect to (a) the overall adoption, (b) the size-based adoption, and (c) the industry-based adoption. This leads to the identification of four emerging patterns of m-commerce adoption in Vietnamese SMEs. The study shows that m-commerce adoption in Vietnamese SMEs, in general, is still quite low. It finds out that there is not much difference in the adoption of m-commerce between SMEs with different sizes. The study further reveals that there are significant differences in the adoption of m-commerce between SMEs with different capital scales and in different industries.

In the second stage, SEM is adopted for testing and validating the proposed conceptual framework for the adoption of m-commerce in Vietnamese SMEs. This leads to the identification of eight critical determinants for m-commerce adoption in Vietnamese SMEs including perceived benefits, perceived compatibility, perceived security, organizational readiness, organizational innovativeness, customer pressures, government support, and managers' IT knowledge. Such critical determinants are then used as the input for neural network analysis in evaluating their relative importance. This results in the identification of perceived security as the most critical determinant for m-commerce adoption. It is followed by customer pressures, perceived compatibility, organizational innovativeness, perceived benefits, managers' IT knowledge, government support, and organizational readiness.

This study contributes to m-commerce research from both theoretical and practical perspectives. Theoretically, this study develops an integrated framework for better understanding m-commerce adoption in SMEs. This expands the body of knowledge in m-commerce adoption in developing countries. Practically, the study leads to several major findings that provide various stakeholders with insights for developing appropriate strategies and policies to enhance the diffusion of m-commerce in Vietnam. Such findings are also useful for other developing countries in their development of m-commerce in SMEs.