The Possible Causes of Low E-commerce Adoption in Romania – Conceptualization of Trust Effect with regard to Low Level of Technology Acceptance
The Possible Causes of Low E-commerce Adoption in Romania – Conceptualization of Trust Effect with regard to Low Level of Technology Acceptance

Summary/Abstract: Despite the high level of e-commerce adoption (43% in average) among most EU countries, Romania only has a 6% adoption rate which is the poorest in the European Union. Using data from secondary sources we compare Romanian e-commerce adoption rates and Internet penetration rates with the other newly accepted EU members‘ same datasets. Our primary objectives with this article are (1) to see into the possible causes of the low e-commerce adoption rate among internet users in Romania, such as distribution channel structure peculiarities, customer trust issues as well as technology acceptance level, and (2) to emphasize on one of its possible causes that we believe to be a general lack of customer trust in Romanian e-commerce platform operators. Our aim is to see into the possible cause-effect relationship between lack of trust and low e-commerce adoption rate. We conduct a literature review and with the help of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) we conceptually link low e-commerce adoption to the notion of trust. In the final part of the paper we present and conceptualize the notion of trust.

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