The roles of user interface design and uncertainty avoidance in B2C ecommerce success: Using evidence from three national cultures

Abstract

Most related previous studies have focused on measuring B2C ecommerce success instead of exploring its predictors, and even fewer studies have tested their models across diverse cultures, even though most ecommerce markets involve multiple cultures. Our study extends this line of research by newly identifying and incorporating three predictors of B2C ecommerce success’s system-quality dimension: the formatting quality (FQ), picture quality (PQ), and third-party seal (TPS) user-interface-design factors (UIDFs). Given the uncertainty associated with online shopping, we also incorporated uncertainty avoidance’s moderating influence on B2C ecommerce success as one of Hoftstede’s national culture dimensions. Motivated by cross-cultural research suggesting that behavioral models often do not hold across different cultures, we tested our model using a sample of 768 B2C consumers from Kuwait, Poland, and Latvia. These countries represent three distinct and understudied national cultures: the Arab world, Central Europe, and Eastern Europe. Our results support our newly hypothesized model, suggesting that both picture quality and formatting positively affect system quality, while—surprisingly—TPSs do not. We also found that uncertainty avoidance moderates the relationship between user satisfaction and reuse intentions but not the relationship between perceived value and reuse intentions. Finally, we found that our newly expanded model is robust across the three national cultures we explored; therefore, it can explain reuse intentions in distinct cultures and a B2C ecommerce context. This study’s findings present important implications for practitioners and researchers who seek to understand and improve B2C ecommerce success across distinct national cultures.