Unraveling the Challenges and Drivers of Metaverse E-Commerce: A Thematic Analysis

With the increasing popularity of the metaverse, e-commerce has the potential to hold an integral role in the virtual marketplace. Leading tech firms and numerous stat-ups are making a significant contribution to exhilarate the metaverse in their business. Despite this, there is a dearth of scholarly research on e-commerce related to the metaverse. This study aims to systematically review the primary factors that influence the metaverse’s adoption in the e-commerce industry, including the challenges faced, and look into a novel consumer-centered adoption model. This study systematically conducts a thematic analysis of 27 scholarly published articles. We searched Scopus and the Web of Science Core Collection for relevant published papers up to December 2023. The analysis uncovers the main emerging themes and challenges of adoption in the realm of metaverse e-commerce. The thematic analysis uncovers a total of 35 sub-themes and 8 noteworthy emerging themes related to the adoption of metaverse e-commerce: responsiveness system quality, perceived informativeness, perceived virtual marketplace, avatar influencer, hedonic value, accessible metaverse infrastructure, digitalized consumer mindset, virtual consumer engagement. Moreover, this study also uncovers 16 adoption issues for designing metaverse e-commerce applications. The novelty of this study lies in the development of a conceptual framework that reveals how metaverse providers might implement adoption factors considering the issues that arise in concurrent metaverse e-commerce. The paper concludes by providing a future research agenda for more investigations.