Culture Dependent Benefits of E-commerce: A Consumer Perspective

Abstract

The Internet has been identified as the world’s fastest growing marketplace (Adapa 2008), continuously increasing in customer volume while traditional brick and mortar shopping decreases (Li et al. 1999). It is suggested that such growth is because customers nowadays value convenience and freedom from time and location limitations. It is not a surprise therefore that many businesses want to take advantage of this form of trading to gain access to global e-markets. At the same time however, a significant discrepancy of frequency of online shopping is noticeable across countries, which means that not all e-businesses can benefit equally from online trading. This inconsistency across countries in online shopping appears to be due to misunderstandings related to different cultural requirements, which according to Tan et al. (2007) have been found to have a direct effect on whether or not online shopping is adopted. Their evidence is preceded by research from Anant (2002) who stated that ‘in the highly competitive area of e-business any cross cultural miscommunication in cyberspace may leave individuals or organisations cut off from one of the most important online markets in the world’. Cultural influence is therefore recognised as a key moderator of e-commerce adoption and is now the focus of researchers and practitioners who aim to understand its moderating effect on consumers’ willingness to online shopping. Understanding such effects however is increasingly difficult due to globalisation and mass migration. Out of this complexity, the phenomenon of acculturation has emerged, which brings into view the possibility of change through adopting the host country’s cultural behaviour. Thus it appears to be crucial to investigate whether online shopping customers who are encouraged to mingle and migrate from country to country can overcome their native culture determined requirements and adopt e-commerce strategy and if so assess how this change affects their perception of advantages and disadvantages deriving from e-commerce. This study therefore aims to explore the extent to which native culture (couture of the country in which consumers grew up and with which they identify themselves) and non-native culture (culture of the country of consumers’ temporal residence) affect consumers’ e-commerce adoption decision and the effect of those two cultures on consumers’ perception of advantages and disadvantages deriving from online shopping. Findings are then compared and contrasted to conclude whether consumers changing cultural environment are able to overcome their culture determined behaviour and fully accept e-commerce strategy.