Adding clicks to bricks: a case study of e-commerce adoption by a Catalan small retailer
通过一家西班牙葡萄酒零售小企业的失败案例，研究小企业为何及如何采纳电子商务，发现非正式过程和社会关系比竞争等外部因素影响更大。
This paper explores why and how one small business adopted e-commerce. Understanding the importance of a chronological perspective, the paper first develops a conceptual model that explicitly incorporates both different stages of e-commerce functionality and the different phases of the e-commerce adoption process. It relates these to a set of adoption factors classified into contextual, organisational, managerial, and e-commerce-specific categories. The paper explores and illustrates the model with the case history of a wine retailing microenterprise based in Catalonia, Spain that ultimately failed. The presented model is found to provide a workable basis for analysis, and the findings demonstrate the way in which different factors affect different phases of the adoption process. More generally, it finds expected contextual factors such as competitors or customers to have little impact on adoption, which is affected more by informal processes and social relations. The paper ends by questioning the simplicity of progressive e-commerce models that fail to incorporate abandonment of the technology, and fail to account for the lack of business value that some e-commerce projects deliver. The case's chronological approach also identifies the path-dependent manner in which earlier decisions impact later e-commerce trajectories, with short-term, subjective decisions potentially constraining e-commerce in the longer term.