eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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Nowadays, people are more and more shifting their consumption to the Web. In logistics and freight services, shipping and tracking of shipments, which were earlier done by phone or fax, are now executed in the Web with specific shipping applications. The object of this thesis is to find out which factors form a user’s perception of an e-commerce application and how the perception can be influenced and improved. The thesis is conducted for DHL Express by studying the acceptance of their most used shipping application, DHL IntraShip.

The main goal of this research was to discover which factors form a user’s perception about an e-commerce application and which forces moderate the determining factors. The biggest objective for the literature study is to build a model, which explains how the perception of the acceptance of an application is build and the relationships between the factors and the moderating forces behind them. Another objective of the study is to apply the constructed model to the case application and identify influencing factors in practice. The third objective was to provide information about the practical problems in the DHL IntraShip application.

The theoretical study is done by analyzing different technology acceptance theories and the factors in them. Also the connection between technology acceptance factors and usability definition is searched, but eventually only loose connections were discovered. Based on this analysis, a revised e-commerce technology acceptance model for B2B business is constructed, which suggests that the factors forming a user’s opinion about an e-commerce application are perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived reliance and trust. In addition to these, facilitating conditions are affecting straight the actual usage behavior. The moderating factors that either strengthen or weaken the importance of the determining factors were stated to be gender, age and experience of use.

The empirical research is constituted by interviewing six B2B frequent users of DHL IntraShip. The chosen research method was semi-structured interviews combined with an observation study. Based on the empirical research, the revised technology acceptance model was tested and verified: perceived usefulness, ease of use reliance, trust and facilitating conditions seemed to affect the perception of DHL IntraShip. However, the factors were modified by gender, age and experience as follows: the effect of perceived usefulness is stronger for men, young and users with high experience, perceived ease of use affects stronger for older females and weaker for users with high experience, perceived reliance is stronger for novice users and trust affects more the perceptions of females.