Barriers to adopting E-commerce in Chinese rural areas: A case study

Abstract

Although e-commerce has been adopted and developed rapidly in rural areas in China during the past two years, serious issues have been encountered as well. Practitioners and scientists proposed lists of barriers. However, such lists differ with each other for different regions and at different time. Fixed lists may not help much practically. Present research proposes a framework named N3F4 to structure and formalize such barriers. Based on the framework, researchers could make a list of barriers for a given region, perform surveys among interested people, prioritize the barriers, analyze reasons and propose solutions. In this paper, we introduce the N3F4 framework, and present a case study of applying the framework in one small county in China. The result shows that the N3F4 framework helps structure barriers before performing the survey, and it also helps analyze the result and come up with solutions afterwards, both effectively and efficiently.