ECA: an E-commerce Consumer Acceptance Model

The paper starts from the hypothesis that consumers' purchase decisions are strongly influenced by other members of social network and in particular by people with the same interests, social affinity, their centrality in the network and the electronic word of mouth. Starting from an analysis of literature on user acceptance, we developed a model called E-Commerce Consumer Acceptance - ECA, that takes into account specific elements that influence consumer acceptance in the context of the online social networks. The paper extends the Technology Acceptance Model - TAM and TAM2 from a social network perspective to analyse how social influence can affect consumer acceptance of e-commerce in the specific context of social networks.