This research project is a quantitative enquiry focused specifically on the value consumption of digital business platforms (DBP's) in relation to how informal sector traders (IST's) are using them to buy, sell and market their product and services in their daily trade functions. This study has adopted the approach of classifying the social media platforms, internet banking platforms and mobile payments platforms, as a single collective and defined under the banner of Digital Business Platforms. The advantage to this approach, is that it provides a multi-dimensional view of the perceived value-axis based on positive and negative experiences of using a variety of digital platforms including messaging, payments, and banking applications on their mobile phones in their daily trading functions. This study examines the positive experiences of perceived value (PV), collectively in the form of social value (SV), emotional value (EV) and functional value (FV). On the opposite end of the value spectrum, are the negative experiences of perceived risk in the form of price risk (PR) and technical barriers (TB) for the same group of informal sector traders. Understanding the relational impacts of these positive and negative experiences of value consumption, may lead to an understanding of their influence in the perceived usefulness (PU) and the perceived ease of use (PEoU) of DBP's. The results of these relationships will shed some light towards the behavioural intention (BI) to adopt DBP's and their actual usage in the long term. The analysis yielded the following results: for positive experiences, emotional value had the least impact on both perceived ease of use and usefulness and functional value was higher than social value. This means that IST's place more value on the utility of DBP's, than the emotional and social values. Regarding the negative experiences, price risk had the most significant impact on the willingness to adopt DBP's by ISTs.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uct/oai:localhost:11427/38007 |
| Date | 03 July 2023 |
| Creators | Makholwa, Clement |
| Contributors | Reyneke, Mignon |
| Publisher | Faculty of Commerce, Graduate School of Business (GSB) |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Master Thesis, Masters, MPhil |
| Format | application/pdf |
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