This article investigates and discusses the institutional factors influencing decisions of e-commerce adoption in Saudi small and medium enterprises (SMEs) from the temporal view. This article has been conducted in two phases: a full survey in 2013 and the follow-up targeted interviews in 2016. The analysis results demonstrated that there is a clear difference between initial e-commerce adoption and institutionalization in SMEs in terms of institutional predictors. When e-commerce was at its infant stage, governmental support and well-defined legal and regulations system were instrumental and served as mainly institutional forces to encourage firms to adopt e-commerce. As time went on and e-commerce became more business-driven, these effects become less important, even insignificant; instead of these, perceived market forces and perceived social awareness of e-commerce emerges as critical contributions to push SMEs to engage in e-commerce more sophisticatedly.

The adoption of e-commerce technologies is an organization-learning process. Existing literature on the adoption has not been adequately addressed on this nature. This study develops a model and instrument to investigate the determinants of both initial adoption of e-commerce and its sophisticated extent in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in less developed countries' context. A model is tested empirically by using the data collected in Saudi Arabia. Since the sophistication of e-commerce is essential to gain full benefits from the technology, it is important to understand well influential factors of a decision of sophisticated adoption. Therefore, this present study is a necessary contribution to the literature.

This article investigates and discusses the institutional factors influencing decisions of e-commerce adoption in Saudi small and medium enterprises (SMEs) from the temporal view. This article has been conducted in two phases: a full survey in 2013 and the follow-up targeted interviews in 2016. The analysis results demonstrated that there is a clear difference between initial e-commerce adoption and institutionalization in SMEs in terms of institutional predictors. When e-commerce was at its infant stage, governmental support and well-defined legal and regulations system were instrumental and served as mainly institutional forces to encourage firms to adopt e-commerce. As time went on and e-commerce became more business-driven, these effects become less important, even insignificant; instead of these, perceived market forces and perceived social awareness of e-commerce emerges as critical contributions to push SMEs to engage in e-commerce more sophisticatedly.