E Commerce in Different Cultures

The standardization vs. adaptation debate in international marketing is still ongoing, yet, in the
online realm the discussion is only just emerging. While practitioners are excited to jump on the
online communication and commerce bandwagon, empirical research on the issue of online
standardization vs. adaptation is still relatively limited and mostly concerns US firms. This paper
explores 100 German companies' domestic, U.S., U.K. and Latin American websites and
employs a cultural value analysis. We build on Hofstede's and Hall's cultural framework.
Findings suggest that cultural value depiction is not very strong in the relevant markets, thus a
certain degree of 'cultural alienation' takes place. It is suggested that to engage better with their
customer and reach better cultural congruency companies need to work harder on developing
culturally adapted websites.
Culture is widely treated as an essential factor for the success of e-commerce, yet the concept
itself is still clouded in bewilderment. Furthermore, there has been little research on usage
behavior in the context of developing countries; e.g., Islamic countries. By using Islamic culture
as the case study, this study highlights the website information architecture practical design
indication and reports the partial analysis of the investigation on how culture design of
information architecture (IA) for B2C e-commerce website will has a positive affect to the user
performance tasks (browsing, searching and purchasing books activities). Analyses of one-way
between-groups multivariate analysis of variance (one-way MANOVA) and paired-samples t-test
were performed. The result showed that the task time performance of the Middle East and the
Malaysian users are different and faster when using the culture centred e-commerce website.
Thus, provides empirical evidence on the positive influence of culturally design website to
performance.
The continuous growth and development of ecommerce around the world is disproportionate to
Asianconsumers’ adoption of online shopping. The average adoption rate in Asian countries is
low compared to that in western countries. The purpose of this paper is to provide an
understanding of the current situation regarding online shopping behavior in Asian countries,
especially Malaysia. The factors that are believed to influence consumers’ adoption of
ecommerce fall into three main categories: consumer attitudes towards online transaction
processing systems, the security and privacy of consumer personal information within merchant
systems, and trust in reliability of online vendors. This study provides a foundational
understanding of how security and privacy issue in online transactions, and trust in reliability of
online vendors affect consumers’ confidence in participating in e-commerce. Therefore, those
organizations that are involved in e-commerce are expected to take note of the findings,
especially in Malaysia context.