User acceptance of B2C EC systems remains a complex and dynamic phenomenon in
information systems research (Lui and Jamieson, 2003). This study examines it, by using the
original TAM model and adding another important factor, the perceived risk. Consistent with
previous studies, perceived risks are found to influence online shopping acceptance. However,
the contributions of this study are that it suggests a “narrower view” of the overall level of
perceived risk dividing it into two basic sub-factors: the transactional security and the product
delivery and services.
Furthermore, only 37.9 per cent of the respondents had e-shopping experience. That
means that a comparatively large proportion of the sample was made up of inexperienced
online shoppers. This piece of information about the sample structure reveals a core limitation
of this study, considering the weakness of generalisation of the results, in comparison with
researches which use a sample with more experienced participants (Van der Heijden et al.,
2003).
Consequently, researches with more experienced online shoppers are encouraged to
replicate and extend this study, so as to extract more precise, meaningful and reliable results
about the intention to transact with e-commerce systems.