Consumer attitudes toward online shopping: An exploratory study from Jordan

Copyright © 2014, IGI Global. In the era of the diffusion of e-commerce and its services offered to the consumers over the Internet, the Internet is commonly used by both consumers and businesses to buy and sell their goods and services worldwide. This study focuses on the factors influencing customers' decisions and attitudes toward adopting online shopping in Jordan. The study found that online shopping in Jordan is still not very common, due to challenges and barriers that affect the diffusion of online shopping: delivery barriers, such as the lack of prepared transportation and mapping infrastructure, lack of reliable delivery system for delivering bought goods to the customers caused by the lack of postcode system; and lack of knowledge and awareness about the benefits of e-commerce among retailers and consumers. A structured questionnaire was distributed among 50 participants (university students, employees/professionals etc.), and then the collected data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences Version 18.02 (SPSS). The results show that attitudes toward online shopping and intention to shop online were affected by lack of human resources, such as low level of experience in using the Internet and shopping websites for shopping, lack of developed IT infrastructure, trust in e-retailers, and online payment and delivery service concerns. However, Jordanian consumers are willing to adopt and recommend online shopping for others as an alternative way for shopping

The impact of mobile phone uses in the developing world: giving voice to the rural poor in the Congo

In recent years, the rise of information and communication technologies (ICTs) contrasted with the dire living conditions of the world’s poorest has been the subject of debate among industry and academia. However, despite the amount of writings produced on mobile phones, Western bias is surprisingly unbridledly prevailing alongside the fêted dissemination of mobile phones. Expansive literature tends to present the rapid adoption of mobile phones among rural individuals, with little to no indication of how local values and voices are respected or promoted. We undertook semi-structured interviews with 16 rural chiefs to inquire into ways in which mobile phones enabled socio-economic development in the rural Congo. Rather than using quantitative, large-scale, or top-down data, we sought to give voice to chiefs themselves about the role of mobile phones. We found that Western bias dominates the literature and deployment of mobile phones more than usually acknowledged. We suggested some paths forward, while bringing the African communal Utu or Ubuntu culture to the center stage

Using device detection techniques in M-learning scenarios

Recent studies of mobile Web trends show the continued explosion of mobile-friend content. However, the wide number and heterogeneity of mobile devices poses several challenges for Web programmers, who want automatic delivery of context and adaptation of the content to mobile devices. Hence, the device detection phase assumes an important role in this process. In this chapter, the authors compare the most used approaches for mobile device detection. Based on this study, they present an architecture for detecting and delivering uniform m-Learning content to students in a Higher School. The authors focus mainly on the XML device capabilities repository and on the REST API Web Service for dealing with device data. In the former, the authors detail the respective capabilities schema and present a new caching approach. In the latter, they present an extension of the current API for dealing with it. Finally, the authors validate their approach by presenting the overall data and statistics collected through the Google Analytics service, in order to better understand the adherence to the mobile Web interface, its evolution over time, and the main weaknesses