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The purpose of this paper is to develop an adoption model to identify the critical factors that affect firms' intention to adopt mobile enabled supply chain systems (mSCM) in retail industry. This study focuses on inter‐organizational dimension since mSCM is an inter‐organizational system that provides both inter‐ and intra‐organizational linkages for firms across the supply chain.

A survey method was used to test the proposed model. Data from this study were obtained from South Korean firms.

Supply chain awareness was shown to be a strong predictor of both inter‐organizational dependence and inter‐organizational trust which positively affects firms' long‐term relationship with their trading partners. Institutional pressures, long‐term relationship, and top management support also had a significant influence firms' mSCM adoption intention.

First, only executives and managers in retail industry of South Korea were surveyed, thus, the results may not be generalized to retail industry in other countries. Second, the current study focuses on a firm's mSCM adoption intention rather than actual adoption.

This study provides useful insights for practitioners to better manage institutional pressures and nurture long‐term relationship in order to promote co‐adoption of mSCM.

This study provides useful insights for supply chain members on how to overcome barriers to adopting an innovation and to increase the chance of successfully adopting mSCM in the retail supply chain.

By adopting a social presence theory perspective, this study aims investigate the influence of perceived usefulness of live chat services and of their unique human attributes on customer attitudes, beliefs and behaviours in the context of online travel shopping.

Based on a cross-sectional survey research involving 8 travel provider websites and 631 travel consumers, this work applies structural equation modelling to analyse the data.

The results illustrate that the perceived usefulness from the communication with a human live chat assistant positively influences customer attitudes and trust towards the website as well as increasing purchase intention. The findings further illustrate the role of the human social cues conveyed by live chat facilities, namely, human warmth, human assurance, human attentiveness and human customised content in positively moderating this effect.

The study is limited to specific human attributes. Future research could investigate the role of other human characteristics as well as assess the ability of artificial intelligent powered chatbots in replicating the human elements outlined in this research.

The study provides a unique contribution to the travel literature by offering empirical insights and conceptual clarity into the usefulness of human operated live chat communication on travellers’ attitudes, trust towards the website and purchase intentions.