Malaysian SMEs Performance and the use of ECommerce: A Multi-Group Analysis of Click-and-Mortar and Pure-Play E-Retailers

This research focuses on SMEs’ adoption of e-commerce and its impact to their performance in click-and-mortar and pure-play e-retailers in Malaysia. This research framework had been developed based on Resource-Based View (RBV) and Unified Theory of Acceptance & Use of Technology (UTAUT). At the same time, the combined framework contributes the new approach of studying the performance of the post adoption and factors adopting a technology. The quantitative research data were collected from 225 Malaysian SMEs operators who had adopted e-commerce. This research uses census sampling technique to collect the data from the respondents. Then, the data were used to investigate its measurement model and structural model via the analysis from SPSS 20 and SmartPLS 3.0. Both categories of adopters had the different opinion about the effort expectancy in encouraging the use of e-commerce that produces performance. Before conducting the further analysis in the group comparison via multi-group analysis (MGA), a three-step procedure, the measurement invariance of composite models (MICOM) was conducted. The result showed that among these two categories of businesses had a very different view about the effort expectancy in adopting the e-commerce. Thus, the result may provide the insight to previous researchers who had not segregated the adopters into click-and-mortar and pure-play e-commerce adopters. The research is particularly useful for practitioners by segregating the different marketing strategy for the respective groups of the e-commerce adopters.