Scalable Information Systems for Agribusiness: Developing Farmers’ Digital Capabilities for E-commerce Platform Adoption

INTRODUCTION: Digital transformation is considered as challenging yet imperative in Vietnam recently. In agriculture sector, one of the directions to comprehensively pro-mote digital transformation is to encourage and support farmers to promote their agribusiness on e-commerce platforms. OBJECTIVES: This study aims to exploratorily develop a framework for farmers’ digital capabilities for e-commerce agribusines and empirically examine how the dimensions of such developed framework impact farmers’ adoption of e-commerce platforms for promoting their agriculture products. METHODS: A mixed method study design is employed. We conduct a literature review of recognized databases and focus group technique to develop a framework for farmers’ digital capabilities for e-commerce agribusiness. Moreover, a field survey is designed to collect empirical data of farmers’ perceptions on adopting e-commerce agribusiness and quantitatively determine how dimensions of farmers’ digital capabilities could impact their adoption of e-commerce platforms. EFA (Exploratory Factor Analysis) and multiple regression are used for data analysis. RESULTS: Study findings show that the four dimensions of farmers’ digital capabilities for e-commerce agribusiness (Attitude toward e-commerce agribusiness, Basic ICT capabilities, E-commerce digital marketing capabilities, and Digital learning capabilities) positively contribute to their adoption of e-commerce platforms. CONCLUSION: This study proposes a framework for farmers’ digital capabilities and verifies that the four dimensions of the framework could significantly enhance farmers’ e-commerce platform adoption. We recommend several practical means to boost farmers’ adoption. Future research could apply our proposed framework to examine the formation of farmers’ e-commerce adoption in social platforms and offer solutions to enhanced agribusiness.