Cross-Cultural Differences In E-Commerce: A Comparison Between China And The Philippines

With the development of the internet economy,e-commerce has developed rapidly on a global scale,forming an important force for global economic development.Meanwhile,new challenges to global enterprises and scholar arise.When people from different social systems and different cultural backgrounds conduct online shopping,they often encounter some cultural differences,and these cultural differences may influence the development of e-commerce.The issue of cross-cultural e-commerce development has become a focus of attention in the business and academic circles.It is vital to address this issue for the further development of the global e-commerce economy.In Asia,China’s e-commerce websites are doing well,but those in the Philippines lags behind.This thesis studies the cultural differences between the two countries’ e-commerce websites,analyzes the consumer cultural differences,and puts forward suggestions,so that the two countries can achieve mutual benefit and better development.This thesis establishes a new theoretical framework for analyzing Chinese e-commerce websites TMALL and the Philippine e-commerce website LAZADA.Based on the cultural dimension theory of Hofstete（2010）,the author combines the framework of Marcus ＆ Gould（2000）,Dormann ＆ Chisalita（2002）,Robbins ＆ Stylianou（2003）,Marcus ＆ Ackerman（2002）,Singh ＆ Matsuo（2004）,Callahan（2005）,which mainly analyze the cultural dimension of websites.The author analyzes the cultural dimensions in the design of the two websites.Then based on the results of the websites’ culture dimensions,the hypothesis of cultural dimensions of consumers are proposed and the questionnaire is designed.Through the questionnaire survey,the cultural dimension of the Chinese and Philippine consumers is analyzed.The differences between the cultural dimension reflected by consumers’ preferences and the cultural dimension of e-commerce websites are analyzed through content analysis,frequency statistics,T-test.Based on the above analysis,two main conclusions can be drawn:（1）TMALL has higher power distance,more collectivism and femininity than LAZADA.TMALL has long-term orientation while LAZADA tends to have short-term orientation.（2）Chinese consumers’ cultural dimensions are collectivism and femininity,while Filipino consumers’ cultural dimensions are individualism and masculinity.It is suggested to modify the cultural dimension of the e-commerce website to adapt to the cultural dimension of the consumers.Philippine consumers tend to more masculinity,the websites should pay attention to use cool colors.Chinese consumers tend to be collectivism,the websites should pay attention to the establishment of member clubs to improve customers’ participation.The originality of this paper lies in that author combines the theoretical frameworks of predecessors and analyzes the cultural dimensions of e-commerce websites,consumers cultural dimensions in China and the Philippines from five cultural dimensions,the old frameworks have been updated.The findings of this study have a number of important implications for future practice in cross-cultural e-commerce,especially for Chinese enterprises setting up stores in LAZADA and Philippine enterprises setting up stores in TMALL.