Factors Affecting The Adoption Of Electronic Marketing On Ethiopian Supermarkets Case Study Of Selected Supermarkets In Addis Ababa

In a knowledge society, organisations need to develop competitive advantages through the effective utilization of electronic marketing in order to succeed in markets. The purpose of this study was to investigate factors affecting e-marketing adoption on Ethiopian supermarkets. Data were collected from 107 Ethiopian supermarkets and the data was collected through a cross-sectional survey design as it is instrumental in collecting data from a population of interest at one point in time. Variables were tested for their relationship with e-marketing adoption using correlation and regression analysis by applying statistical package for social sciences (SPSS). The findings of the study indicate that the proposed model explains 86.4 per cent of the variance of e-marketing adoption. It was found that competitive pressure, adoption cost and IT infrastructure are the most influencing factors of e-marketing adoption. Among them, competitive pressure was proved to be the most significant factor. On the other hand, Owners or managers IT knowledge and governmental support influence but not as strongly as the other three attributes. From these, adoption cost is an inhibitor of the adoption of e-marketing. Therefore, it is recommended that managers, particularly owners of the supermarkets, should be convinced that e-marketing adoption is necessary to maintain and achieve competitive advantage while non-adoption of an e-marketing innovation that is adopted by others in such an environment may result in competitive disadvantage since competitive pressure was proved to be the most significant factors of e-marketing adoption. The researcher further suggested that future research could be conducted with longitudinal data and on a wider scale on all supermarkets in the country cutting across all the counties by collecting data from customers, users of the e-commerce platforms and various other stakeholders