The Importance of Ease of Use, Usefulness, and Trust to Online Consumers - End User Computing Challenges and Technologies: Emerging Tools and Applications - page 269

Table 5b. Hierarchical regression results

Coefficient S.E. Sig

BUY (Y or N)

Age -.0 .00**

Hours spent using internet and email .00 .0

Ease of Use . .*

Usefulness -.0 .**

Trust -. .

Figure 2. TAM adapted for electronic commerce acceptance—supported relationships

Dotted line indicated a significant relationship that is reverse of the hypothesis

impacts technology adoption, this result is quite
surprising. Certainly there could be issues with
the operalization of the ease of use measure
or causality between ease of use and level of
electronic commerce participation. The ease of
use measure used in this research addressed the
ease of placing and paying for an order as well
as rectifying problems. Perhaps those individu-
als who are more frequent online shoppers have
encountered difficulties, which has contributed
to lower attitude towards ease of use

Prior research has found that convenience is
an important factor in technology adoption by
older adults (Smither & Braun, 1994; Zeithaml &
Gilly, 1987). Likewise, these results indicate that
usefulness has a significant affect on all four of the
measures of electronic commerce participation:
whether it was used, frequency, number of times
purchases were made and amount spent online.
Convenience and time saving are frequently
cited as online shopping advantages and this is
no exception for older consumers. Driving and
shopping can be physically challenging for older