Abstract

The main purpose of this research is to identify what determinants influence an individual consumer's intention to adopt online shopping. One of the main branches of Internet business is online shopping. In academic literature, online shopping is often studied as a new retailing channel in marketing literature. By viewing online shopping as a new kind of IT, this paper attempted to explain and predict customers' intention of adopting online shopping. Ten proposed hypotheses were then empirically tested by using data collected from survey. The results indicate that the relative advantage of online shopping, the compatibility of online shopping, the voluntariness of individual consumer's doing online shopping, customers' prior experience, and consumer innovativeness are positively correlated with individual consumer's intention of adopting online shopping. On contrary, both the transaction cost involved in purchasing goods online and a customer's sensitivity to risk have negative correlation relationship with his/her adoption intention. Two topics--adoption process and post sale service of online shopping were suggested for future research.