An empirical study on the influencing factors on the adoption and use of e-commerce by Thailand SMEs

The Information Technology Policy Framework, "Thailand Vision towards a Knowledge-Based Economy (IT2010)", released in 2002 encourages and supports Thai-small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to apply e-commerce technology in order to enable them to compete on the world stage. This paper outlines a proposed study which aims,to investigate how to enable the SMEs sector in Thailand to adopt and use e-commerce technologies to improve their operations. There are limited previous Studies about the adoption of e-commerce in the Thai SEM sector. Those reports were mainly surveys on the Internet and mostly conducted by government organisations. It is recognized that there is a need to use different approaches to explore the Subject. This paper describes the proposed framework and methodology to investigate the factors and customer behaviors which influence the SMEs adoption and use of e-commerce in Thailand. The first 26 factors are captured from the variables which are covered by Wymer and Regan. The variables form the basis for further investigation for other secondary variables. The second class of variables of consumer behaviors which influence e-commerce adoption and use is adapted predominantly from previous studies which related to consumer behaviours.