Factors Influencing Consumer Acceptance of Cross-Border Electronic Commerce

From the beginning of electronic commerce, the ability to buy from foreign online stores across the world was identified as one of its great potentials. However, even now when domestic online shopping has become commonplace in many countries, crossborder electronic commerce has not gained in popularity at the same rate. From the consumer side, an important reason for this situation is related to trust: consumers have difficulties trusting foreign online stores. The barriers that exist in cross-border contexts make it so that the perception of risk is greatly increased. Another problem is that existing models of consumer acceptance of electronic commerce have, for the most part, focused on the domestic market. Previous studies have identified several critical factors affecting trust and intention of use of domestic online stores, but less research has been conducted on specific factors of cross-border online shopping. The objective of this dissertation is to address these problems by identifying the factors unique to the cross-border context that have a positive influence on trust and its antecedents, within a model of consumer acceptance. In order to do this, three characteristics of the cross-border online shopping experience were established: the difference of nationality in users, language difference and the foreign country itself. The factors affected by these characteristics were identified as nationality information contained in feedback, translation quality of the website, country presence and country-of-origin image. To validate the effect of these proposed factors, separate studies were conducted by surveying Japanese consumers and analyzing their responses using structural equation modeling. In the first study, the effect of indicating nationality information of the user in the feedback of the foreign online store on trust was analyzed. Three experimental conditions were created, based on the nationality of the majority of users giving feedback: (1) feedback from Japanese users, (2) feedback from Thai users and (3) a control condition of no feedback. The results showed that feedback from users of the same country as the consumers’ improves trust in comparison to feedback from foreign users. And that, on the other hand, feedback from foreign users does not improve trust compare to showing no feedback at all. In the second study, related to the language difference, the influence of translation issues on the foreign online store was investigated. The experiment considered two types of translation issues, related to the adequacy of translation (correct or incorrect) and to the completeness of translation (full or partial). Four experimental conditions with different combinations of translation issues were evaluated. The results showed that correct use of Japanese language positively affects perceived ease of communication, ease of use and trust, compared to all other conditions with incorrect translation, partial translation, or a mixture of both. These findings highlight the importance of language and translation quality assurance. In the third study, related to information about the foreign country itself, it was hypothesized that foreign websites may be able to improve trust by increasing the association with their country-of-origin. In order to test this hypothesis, the factor of country presence was introduced. Two experimental conditions were considered: country-related pictures and generic pictures, each one evaluated for Thailand and Singapore mockup online stores. The results showed that including country-related pictures has a positive effect on country presence, but that trust was not directly affected by country presence. Instead, the effect of country presence was mediated by the visual appeal of the online store. In the fourth and final study, also related to the foreign country itself, the extrinsic factor of country-of-origin image was introduced. It was defined as the cognitive and affective perception of the foreign country that the consumer holds in mind. It was hypothesized that the image of the foreign country would have an effect on the perception of an online store from that country. The results showed that country-of-origin image does have a positive influence, but that this influence is not equal for all countries. In general, the image of Thailand as a country has a wider influence on the Thai online store, than the Singapore image has on the Singaporean online store. This dissertation contributes to the study of consumer acceptance in cross-border electronic commerce by providing evidence of the importance of considering the unique variables that exist in a cross-border context. The findings indicate that in order to improve the trust and acceptance of foreign online stores it is important to consider how they may be affected by the differences that exist in consumers and the differences in the context itself, and how these two components interact to affect consumer perception on different dimensions. The findings also contribute evidence that pre-existing perceptions of one country from the perspective of consumers from another country have influence on the evaluation of the foreign online store. Online stores may be able to utilize the image of their country-of-origin to their advantage. In addition, institutions or organizations, especially in developing countries, could consider strategies to promote country image with the goal of improving the overall perception of their electronic commerce markets.