Will B2C E-commerce Developed in One Cultural Environment be Suitable for Another Culture: A Cross-Cultural Study between amazon.co.uk (UK) and dangdang.com (China)

摘要

In an era of seemingly e-everything e-commerce is changing the way people do business and impacting shopping habits. Increasingly this change has an international dimension in both trans-national transactions and exporting e-commerce business models from one culture to another. Typically this last element has involved exporting Western e-business models to the rest of the world. However, it is unclear if an e-commerce business model developed in one cultural environment would be suitable for another culture. This paper attempts to explore this question by investigating two cases: amazon.co.uk in the West (UK) and dangdang.com in the East (China). In addition, differences between countries may be due to deep embedded cultural aspects, differences in infrastructure and business environment or a mix of these. The study in this paper draws upon secondary data, primary interview data and survey data of user practices. Amazon.com is probably one of the most written about e-commerce cases and there is a much secondary data to support an investigation. Dangdang.com is less well know and covered in the literature (at least in the West) so face-to-face interview data is used to develop the case study. To understand user practices the study uses survey data, focusing on selected groups in Beijing (China) and Portsmouth (UK).To help investigate and analyze the two cases this paper draws upon Hofstede's cultural works, particularly the individualism vs. collectivism cultural dimension. For the case studies, different cultural aspects and differences in the infrastructure and business environment are identified. Differences in user practices and the environment seems to indicate that e-commerce business models suitable for the West may not be totally suitable for the East.