Onsite/offsite social commerce adoption for SMEs using fuzzy linguistic decision making in complex framework

Abstract

There has been a growing social commerce adoption trend among SMEs for few years. However, it is often a challenging strategic task for SMEs to choose the right type of social commerce. SMEs usually have a limited budget, technical skills and resources and want to maximise productivity with those limited resources. There is much literature that discusses the social commerce adoption strategy for SMEs. However, there is no work to enable SMEs to choose social commerce—onsite/offsite or hybrid strategy. Moreover, very few studies allow the decision-makers to handle uncertain, complex nonlinear relationships of social commerce adoption factors. The paper proposes a fuzzy linguistic multi-criteria group decision-making in a complex framework for onsite, offsite social commerce adoption to address the problem. The proposed approach uses a novel hybrid approach by combining FAHP, FOWA and selection criteria of the technological–organisation–environment (TOE) framework. Unlike previous methods, the proposed approach uses the decision maker's attitudinal characteristics and recommends intelligently using the OWA operator. The approach further demonstrates the decision behaviour of the decision-makers with Fuzzy Minimum (FMin), Fuzzy Maximum (FMax), Laplace criteria, Hurwicz criteria, FWA, FOWA and FPOWA. The framework enables the SMEs to choose the right type of social commerce considering TOE factors that help them build a stronger relationship with current and potential customers. The approach's applicability is demonstrated using a case study of three SMEs seeking to adopt a social commerce type. The analysis results indicate the proposed approach's effectiveness in handling uncertain, complex nonlinear decisions in social commerce adoption.

Do technological, environmental and entrepreneurial factors affect social commerce adoption?

“…, 2012; Ahmad et al. , 2019; Hussain and Merigo, 2022). The TOE framework holds a strong theoretical basis and compact empirical support has been used to explore the adoption of social applications (Oliveira and Martins, 2010).…”

“…Theoretical support Tornatzky and Fleischer (1990) revealed the Technological, Organisational and Environmental (TOE) framework. The TOE framework characterised technology, organisation and environment as the three factors that influence a business when adopting innovations in social applications (Barnett et al, 2012;Ahmad et al, 2019;Hussain and Merigo, 2022). The TOE framework holds a strong theoretical basis and compact empirical support has been used to explore the adoption of social applications (Oliveira and Martins, 2010).…”

“…Technological impact refers to technology that is already in use in an organisation and is regarded as valuable but yet to be employed (Zhu and Kraemer, 2005). Technology has the influence to positively and negatively impact SMEs, depending on their adoption strategy (Hussain and Merigo, 2022). TA covers a lot of sub-factors such as the availability of hardware and software facilities, internet speed and stability to conduct business operations as well as the availability of computer access and connectivity for sub-domains and lastly possessing technical and financial resources to do business activities (Abdulla Ali et al, 2019;Al-Tayyar et al, 2021).…”