Investigating the Effect of Consumer Traits on the Relative Importance of TAM Constructs in an E-Commerce Context

This paper tests whether the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) holds for different groups of customers. In doing so, we investigate the moderating effect of eight customer traits (socio-demographics, psychographics, and prior experience) on important relationships within TAM for an online shopping context. The results show that in general TAM is quite capable of predicting customers' online purchase intentions. For some moderators, however, the impact of a predictor is significantly different. Sociodemographics have the strongest influence on altering the relative importance of the predictors, while the moderating influence of prior online shopping experience is significant in some cases. Psychographics are found to be mostly unrelated to the extent to which TAM predictor impact purchase intentions. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.