Abstract

Information technology is fundamentally changing business transaction worldwide. The advent of internet transaction offers business firms a new frontier of opportunities and challenges. An understanding of how demographic characteristics and socialfactors influence the adoption of online transaction can allow firms to create solutions and plans to attract consumers to their services, thus enabling them to gain a greater share in the market. Using data from a survey of 180 consumers, the study explored the relationship between hypothesized factors influencing online transactions such as consumers’ attitude towards online products, transaction process, cultural diversity, facilitating conditions and the consumer adoption online transactions in Malaysia. The empirical findings suggest that most of the proposed relationships between the constructs postulated by the research model are well supported, accounting for 28.1% of the total variance in the adoption of online transactions. In addition, the findings also suggest that factors such as consumers’ attitude towards online products and services, cultural related factors, and facilitating conditions significantly influence consumers' adoption of online transactions. Firms that wish to attract more consumers online should pay more attention to the quality and the price of their products and services. In addition, designing an interface that takes into consideration the cultural diversities such as language and religious belief among the consumers can induce them to make online transactions through the internet.

Key words: Online transaction, adoption, socio-cultural, consumer attitude.