E-Commerce Adoption And Success Among Women Entrepreneurs In Pakistan: Examining The Mediating Role Of Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy And The Moderating Mechanism Of Business Experience

Abstract

The high rate of e-commerce development provides women in the emerging markets such as Pakistan with high opportunities but sociocultural, psychological, and experience issues still limit the adoption of digital platforms and operational use. The proposed research intends to examine how e-commerce adoption affects business success among the women business in Pakistan with the moderating role of entrepreneur self-efficacy and mediating role played by business experience. The research is based on the Social Cognitive Theory and the Technology-Organization-Environment model and incorporates both psychological and situational aspects to determine the acquisition of confidence and experience to convert the results of digital adoption to business results. It suggests a quantitative research design that involves the use of a cross-sectional survey of the women-led online stores in business in Pakistan. Stratified random sampling will assure the representation of the domains with provinces, sectors, and volumes of businesses and include 300 respondents in the target sample. The SPSS data analysis software will be used to analyze data under descriptive statistics, and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) will be used to test the hypotheses of mediation and moderation. It is the anticipation of the study that it will have empirical evidence on the relation between entrepreneurial self-efficacy and business experience to the success of the e-commerce adoption to business success. Among others, implications of the theory are the application of the Social Cognitive Theory to online entrepreneurial activities in the Pakistani market and embracing psychological and organizational constructs to the TOE framework. In practice, the findings are expected to enlighten policymakers, incubators, and training programs, guide the targeted intervention focused on women having better digital literacy, confidence, and business performance. Additional topics to consider in future studies are longitudinal and cross-cultural validation of the model, will proceed to test other models on what will be mediated and that will be moderated, resilience or access to finance, and will undertake mixed-method methods as it can include aspects on qualitative aspects of what women entrepreneurs have been going through. This paper will seek to support an inclusive aspect of digital entrepreneurship by presenting both psychological and experiential evidence of new policies that would enhance and empower